In the early years of the new century, enjoying the fruits of a commercial arrangement with the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Vuillard began expanding his repertoire of decorative panels and small, intimiste domestic interiors to include portraits and landscapes. Vuillard’s work of this type remained largely unknown to the public at large until several panels were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. This was a genre in which he was to become very successful, and between 18 he painted a number of these large-scale panneaux décoratifs, almost all the result of commissions from a small group of mutual friends and enlightened collectors. In the 1890's, Vuillard began receiving a number of private commissions for wall panels intended to decorate the rooms of private houses. The present portrait was given by Vuillard to Lucy Hessel on the 21st of April 1915, and has remained in the collection of her descendants until recently.Īt the start of his career, Edouard Vuillard joined a group of young artists - including Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard and Kerr-Xavier Roussel - who called themselves the Nabis and were united by a desire to develop a new, more expressive pictorial language, inspired by the work of Paul Gauguin. Another pastel portrait of Jean Reiss of the same date but of somewhat smaller dimensions, is in a private collection in Canada. Depicted wearing a marinière, or sailor suit, the young Jean appears lost in thought, and oblivious to the artist drawing him. The subject of this charming portrait, executed in 1915, is Jean Reiss, a nephew of Vuillard’s close friend and muse Lucy Hessel. Pastel was to become an essential part of Vuillard’s working process until the end of his career, used for landscape and figure studies, compositional drawings and still-life subjects, as well as in preparatory studies for portraits. As the critic and art historian Claude Roger-Marx wrote, in one of the first monographs on the artist, ‘Vuillard often found expression by means of pastels’, and indeed he made more extensive use of the medium than perhaps any French artist since Degas in the previous generation. He drew throughout his life, indeed daily.’ From around 1900 onwards the artist used mainly pastel for his drawings, and soon came to master the subtlety and vibrancy of this challenging medium. Edouard Vuillard was, as one scholar has written, ‘in many ways the supreme graphic artist among the Nabis.
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