Vuillard: The Patterns of Poetry

A couple of months ago, we had the pleasure of seeing Edouard Vuillard on a big, big scale, in the shape of his exuberant 1890s interior designs in the wonderful show on Les Nabis et le Décor in Paris. But Vuillard's rather better known for pictures of a more modest nature, and the place to go right now to marvel at the intimacy and subtlety of his painting is the Holburne Museum in Bath.

Edouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday is, surprisingly, the most extensive show of the artist's work in Britain in 15 years. It's not enormous, by any means, but its 40 or so paintings and prints have been drawn from galleries around Britain and from private collections; some may be familiar but others will be new and fresh.

As a founder member of the Nabis, the group inspired by Paul Gauguin, Vuillard was at the cutting edge of an art that was becoming more concerned with shapes and colours than with the accurate representation of things. Patterns on wallpapers and on fabrics take centre stage in pictures where the figurative shades imperceptibly into abstraction.

Normally, when we go to a show it's easy to pick out the handful of paintings we liked the most, the ones that we think would best illustrate a blog post. At the Holburne, we were spoilt for choice. But we thought we'd start with this one: The Candlestick from the National Galleries of Scotland.

It's an odd picture of bits of things -- a bit of panelling, a bit of a satchel -- and it appears at first strangely lopsided, but there's an unusual beauty and a sense of calmness about it. That cloth on the side table, the blue flock wallpaper, the white woodwork on the left, and the soft brown leather that forms the backdrop to the candle. These are beguiling shapes and textures from an ordinary interior. But, "who speaks of art speaks of poetry," Vuillard said. "There is no art without a poetic aim."

It may be all about shape, pattern and colour, but The Candlestick is in many ways a less abstract-feeling work than many in this exhibition. It's only by looking quite closely at The Artist's Sister with a Cup of Coffee that you can separate her dress from the wallpaper behind and appreciate the detail of this domestic scene. As you study the surface, you can see how flatly Vuillard has painted it: There's no texture whatsoever to these planes of colour. And yet this is in some ways a domestic interior that might, just, have been painted two centuries earlier, by Pieter de Hooch in Delft. There's even what the Dutch call a doorkijkje, a view through the door to the next room.

There's a sense in a lot of Vuillard's paintings of how he was influenced by the 19th-century high tech of photography in his cropping of these images, in the feeling of an intimate snapshot captured unexpectedly. Two Women in a Public Park encapsulates the sensation, with the informal pose of the left-hand figure, the way her arm rests on the empty chair. Again the fantastic patterns of the dresses form blocks of colour that blend with the grass, while the bistro chairs create sinuous curves in the foreground.

One of the most abstracted pictures in the show is this very tiny (13.3 x 19.4 cm) Two Seamstresses in the Workroom, the workroom in question being the one run by Vuillard's mother, with whom the artist lived until she died in the year he turned 60, and who might be just visible behind the block of pale blue on the left. The attention is all given to the fabrics they're working with and the dresses they're wearing. The faces are just profiles, not fleshed out in any way.

In the next picture, by contrast, you can discern everything quite clearly, even though there's no depth to the image. Items in the room are reflected in the mirror, but the mirror glass appears to be flush with the plane of the painting's surface. This is one of more than 500 pictures Vuillard made of his mother, his favourite model, and as so often in his paintings, the sitter is seen from the side or the back, increasing the intimacy and candid nature of the depiction. And what a pattern on the carpet....

This is not solely an exhibition of domestic scenes or intimate outdoor snapshots; there are a handful of landscapes, though they don't grab the attention to the same extent. There's also nothing from Vuillard's later period between the wars, when he concentrated on portraits and his style became more conventional.

One wall is taken up with a collection of lithographs published by Vuillard in 1899, and they are striking in their modernity, perhaps most obviously in The Avenue, another image defined by flat areas of colour, with white sunlight breaking through the trees and creating new patterns on the ground. In a trio of Interiors with Pink Wallpaper Vuillard appears to be suggesting how his decorative work on show now at the Musée du Luxembourg would look in the family home.

Now, as you can see from this photo, the background paint they've used on the walls for this show is quite dark. In fact, it's really, really dark. It's Farrow & Ball's Stiffkey Blue, to be precise, and while the curators have had to keep the light levels down because a lot of the pictures are quite fragile, we have to say we found this gloomy background a bit overwhelming and somehow obtrusive. It seemed not to do justice to some of Vuillard's paintings. Take The Candlestick, for example: We've seen it in Scotland and the work has a heavenly luminosity and ethereal feel. In Bath, it felt as if some of the colour and life had been sucked out by the surroundings.

Let's finish with a work that's in many ways is similar to The Candlestick, but painted in a much sketchier, more abstracted fashion. Again, this is how Vuillard made poetry of the everyday, of a few simple shapes and colours. A box, a couple of books, an inkstand. And just a few brushstrokes to express it all.

This is a really good show. Do go and see it if you get the chance. And it's a must if you're thinking of painting your living room Stiffkey Blue.

While you're at the Holburne

Don't forget the museum's fine collection of 18th-century British painting. It includes the splendid William Wollaston, MP by Thomas Gainsborough, who spent 16 years in Bath.

Last chance for Vuillard in Paris

You have until the end of June to get to the Musée du Luxembourg to see Les Nabis et le Décor, one of the best exhibitions we've seen anywhere in 2019, showing how Vuillard and other members of the Nabis including Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis broke the mould of interior decoration.  

Practicalities

Edouard Vuillard: The Poetry of the Everyday runs at the Holburne Museum in Bath until September 15. The museum is open daily from 1000 (Sundays and bank holidays from 1100) to 1700. Full-price tickets are £12.50 including a Gift Aid donation, £11 without, and can be bought online here. Entry is free on Wednesday afternoons after 1500. The museum is a 15-minute walk from Bath Spa rail station or the bus station next door.

Images

Edouard Vuillard, The Candlestick, c. 1900, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Photo: Antonia Reeve
Edouard Vuillard, The Artist's Sister with a Cup of Coffee, 1893, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum

Edouard Vuillard, Two Women in a Public Park, 1895, Private collection. © The Holburne Museum

Edouard Vuillard, Two Seamstresses in the Workroom, 1893, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Photo: Antonia Reeve

Edouard Vuillard, Madame Vuillard Arranging her Hair, 1900, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. © The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.

Edouard Vuillard, The Blue Inkstand on the Mantelshelf, c. 1900. © Norfolk Museums Service (Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery)

Edouard Vuillard, Interior with Pink Wallpaper I-III, 1899, British Museum, London