?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
ÉDOUARD VUILLARD Femme assise en Intérieur
Color pastels on paper mounted on canvas. 1000x690 mm; 39 3/8x27 1/8 inches. With the artist's signature ink stamp (Lugt 2497a, lower right recto). Ex-collection Niveau Gallery, New York; Dr. Walter Impert, New York; private collection, Pennsylvania.
Likely a preparatory study for Madame Albert Henraux, oil on canvas, 1935, now in a private collection. (Wildenstein, Vuillard: the Inexhaustible Glance: critical catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Paris, 2003, number XII-126).
With a photograph authentication by Jacques Salomon, the artist's nephew, Paris, dated October 5, 1967.
Vuillard (1868-1940) was a Post-Impressionist French artist who grew up in Cuiseaux, Saône-et-Loire. He moved with his family to Paris in 1878, where he studied art at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts from 1886 to 1888. During his training Vuillard met the artists that he would collaborate with to form Les Nabis, a brotherhood of young, rebellious artists established in 1888. The most successful artists to emerge from the group include Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Vuillard. The Nabis (meaning "prophets" in Hebrew) rejected the use of Renaissance perspective and instead were inspired by decorative arts and traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e prints; they embraced two-dimensional surface patterns and unimpeded areas of pure color.
Vuillard produced some of his best known works while directly involved with the Nabis, focusing on figures in warm, ornate interiors filled with complex patterning. The figures in these scenes frequently blend in with the décor, creating a homogeneity covering the picture surface. Vuillard once stated that he did not paint portraits, istead he claimed to "Paint people in their surroundings."
Vuillard began exhibiting at the esteemed Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in the early 1900s, where he befriended Jos Hessel, a senoir partner of the gallery. This connection led to a steady flow of portrait commissions, and the latter decades of Vuillard's oeuvre in the 1920s and 1930s were largely dedicated to these projects capturing Parisian high society.
The subject of the current lot is Lilita Henraux, who along with her husband Albert S. Henraux (1881-1953), the French museum director, were patrons of the arts and collectors; Vuillard painted a portrait of Ms. Henraux in her salon around 1935 (see below), for which this is likely among the preparatory studies.
