1906, Édouard Vuillard, The Gilded Chair, Madame Georges Feydeau and Her Son -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label: After abandoning ambitions for a military career, Vuillard began training as an artist in the studio of Eugène Maillard. By 1890, he had become enamored of Japanese prints and the bold colors and flattened surfaces of Gauguin's paintings, and he helped form the Nabi group along with Bonnard, Denis, and other fellow students at the Académie Julian who shared his enthusiasm for these styles. Throughout the 1890s, depictions of family members, friends, and acquaintances in the varicolored and richly patterned private spaces of bourgeois homes emerged as a constant theme in his paintings. He maintained that he was not interested in painting portraits but rather in depicting people in their habitual surroundings. As the title of this painting suggests, the gilded chair is indeed as much the subject of the composition as the two sitters. Vuillard depicts Marianne Feydeau, wife of French playwright Georges Feydeau and daughter of celebrated painter Carolus-Duran, and her six-year-old son, Michel, amid an array of decorative objects. He renders the gilded surfaces, smooth marble, and upholstery fabrics and textiles with a homogeneous degree of detail that effectively immerses the human figures within the interplay of reflections and shadows in the room.
1906, Édouard Vuillard, The Gilded Chair, Madame Georges Feydeau and Her Son -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label: After abandoning ambitions for a military career, Vuillard began training as an artist in the studio of Eugène Maillard. By 1890, he had become enamored of Japanese prints and the bold colors and flattened surfaces of Gauguin's paintings, and he helped form the Nabi group along with Bonnard, Denis, and other fellow students at the Académie Julian who shared his enthusiasm for these styles. Throughout the 1890s, depictions of family members, friends, and acquaintances in the varicolored and richly patterned private spaces of bourgeois homes emerged as a constant theme in his paintings. He maintained that he was not interested in painting portraits but rather in depicting people in their habitual surroundings. As the title of this painting suggests, the gilded chair is indeed as much the subject of the composition as the two sitters. Vuillard depicts Marianne Feydeau, wife of French playwright Georges Feydeau and daughter of celebrated painter Carolus-Duran, and her six-year-old son, Michel, amid an array of decorative objects. He renders the gilded surfaces, smooth marble, and upholstery fabrics and textiles with a homogeneous degree of detail that effectively immerses the human figures within the interplay of reflections and shadows in the room.