Mother and Child, by Edouard Vuillard

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was destined by his family for a career in the French army but preferred to devote himself to art. He entered the Académie Julian in March 1886 and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in July 1887, although his studies there appear to have been spasmodic. His early interests were in painting still life and domestic interiors, having been attracted by the works of the Dutch masters.

In 1889 he was persuaded to join a group of students at the Académie Julian who called themselves the “brotherhood of Nabis” (Nabi being Hebrew for “prophet”). The motivation of this group was to find a different direction for art from that of the Impressionists, taking their inspiration from the work of Paul Gauguin.

The idea was to rely on memory and imagination rather than direct observation, coupled with the use of colour and shape at their simplest levels, so that the artist made an emotional response to what was being depicted rather than aiming at realism.

Vuillard was happy to experiment in this style for several years and, like his colleague Pierre Bonnard, was also influenced by Japanese woodcuts with their simplicity and emphasis on expressive contour.

He soon became interested in working for the theatre and undertook commissions to design scenery, costumes and programmes for performances of plays by Ibsen, Strindberg and others. This led in turn to commissions to paint sets of decorative panels for wealthy patrons.

In later life, Vuillard turned to landscape studies and increasingly to portraiture, where he was never short of a commission. His later work is generally regarded as being of less interest than his earlier efforts from the Nabis period (up to 1900) and the years up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. As he grew older he moved from the avant-garde to the mainstream.

One area in which he experimented throughout his career was in the painting media he used. Starting with the traditional medium of oil on canvas he later tried used cardboard and very dry oil paint, which allowed him to produce a matt surface that accorded with his desire to produce a flat appearance to the finished work. He later used distemper, a water-based medium mixed with glue, that dried quickly to give an opaque effect when layers of paint were laid on top of the dry surface. The painting under discussion is in oil on cardboard, the grey of which adds a ground to the colour and is left unpainted in places (or the paint has subsequently suffered damage or wear).

Mother and Child

His 1899 “Mother and Child” was one of a series of paintings with a similar theme. Vuillard had spent much of his early life at home with his mother and elder sister, and the Nabi training of working from memory and imagination naturally took him back to scenes that he remembered from a few years before.

The mother and child in this painting were once thought to be Edouard’s sister Marie and her baby, but it is now believed that the “mother” was Misia Natanson, the wife of the editor and art critic of “Revue Blanche”, who was an admirer of Vuillard’s work and responsible for bringing some valuable commissions his way. The baby was not Misia’s own but a niece of hers.

In the painting, the mother, wearing a voluminous blue dress, holds the baby up to play with her, and the baby looks back at her. It is remarkable how a few splodges of paint are able to depict the baby’s features, namely two rosy cheeks, two blue eyes and black crescent for an open mouth. We can see even less of the mother, whose face is turned away from the viewer.

However, most of the detail in this painting is in the décor of the room. Vuillard’s mother and sister were dressmakers, and Vuillard’s memory was clearly of the many patterns on the textiles that they worked with. Every surface in the room is covered with intricate patterns, namely the wallpaper, the cover of the chaise-longue on which the mother sits, the three-panelled screen behind the chaise-longue, the cushions on it, the yellow cabinet at the side, the piece of cloth or carpet that covers a second cabinet, and the mother’s dress. 

Other details are less clearly defined, such as the dog and cat (or maybe two dogs or two cats) that are also on the chaise-longue. The objects are of less importance and interest to the artist than the patterns and textures of the background surfaces that surround the main subjects.

The impression is of a kaleidoscope of brilliant, glowing colours that fill the room and of which the mother and child are a part, with the baby seeming to emerge from the pattern on the wallpaper behind her. Everything works together in a close-knit arrangement that produces, on the one hand, a feeling of claustrophobia, but on the other a sense that everything belongs together. The emotional content is therefore very strong, with the love between mother and child being reflected by their surroundings.

“Mother and Child” is displayed at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland.

© John Welford