Edouard Vuillard

1868 - 1940

European Artist

Edouard Vuillard was born in Cuiseax at the foot of the Jura Mountains, France. He lived most of his artistic life in Paris on the Square Vintimille. A student at the Académie Julian, Vuillard was an early member of the Nabis. It was as a theatrical designer that he learned to work in distemper (tempera paint mixed with sizing), a manner he applied for a considerable period to his own works, done on gray cardboard. Vuillard's very early works show an affinity with those of Corot and Chardin, but in 1890 he began to work in an almost Fauve-like palette that reveals the influence of Gauguin and Japanese prints. He soon abandoned this brilliant color to work in a quiet, softly colored style. From 1914 until his death, he devoted himself entirely to the subtly harmonious, decorative, and nostalgic domestic scenes of the Intimist style with which his name is most closely associated. Vuillard died just after the outbreak of World War II, at La Baule, near St. Nazaire on the Atlantic coast.