French, 1868-1940.

Jean-Édouard Vuillard was a French painter, decorative artist, and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, Vuillard was a prominent member of the avant garde artistic group Les Nabis, creating paintings that assembled areas of pure color.

If it was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec who indelibly captured the spectacle of public life in the cafés and cabarets of Paris in the 1890s, it was Édouard Vuillard who conjured the muffled quiet and richly patterned textures of private life inside the city’s bourgeois homes and gardens. His scenes of everyday life were anchored in the family’s apartment—intimate realms dominated by women. Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) exemplifies the introspective, subtly disquieting mood that Vuillard achieved by allowing flattened, compressed space and complex patterning to nearly obscure the figures in his compositions. In doing so, he treated all the elements in his paintings as equal components of an ornamental whole. “I don’t paint portraits,” he said. “I paint people in their homes.”