Vuillard's Unlikely Obsession: Revisiting Place Vintimille - French artist Edouard Vuillard's works record Paris

Art in America, July, 2001 by Sabine Rewald

Vuillard had used the motif of women and children at leisure in public parks since the early 1890s, when he created the magnificent large panel The Park (1893-94), a nearly life-size depiction of strollers, nursemaids and youngsters.(5) The panel was a commission from his friend Thadee Natanson, the publisher of La Revue Blanche (1891-1903), and Natanson's bride, Misia.(6) In Place Vintimille, another commission, this time for the flamboyant playwright Henry Bernstein, Vuillard first depicted the locale on a large scale.(7) Working on the Bernstein panels during the winter of 1909-10, Vuillard chose the view from his new fourth-floor apartment on Place Vintimille.(8)

Three of the vertical panels show the park, while a fourth shows a view of the rue de Calais leading away from the park. These strikingly decorative views (they combine the picturesque with gentle humor in an overall surface unity of color and design) capture different segments of the elliptical park. Despite the wintry season and the mostly leaden sky, all the benches are occupied. We glimpse hatted ladies, aproned maids, babies in prams, children and dogs. Above and beyond the bare trees rise the faded facades of houses dating from about 1850. Although the three panels at first seem to form a triptych (with the two flanking panels each 8 inches wider than the central one) the horizon lines differ in all three, forms overlap and lines are discontinuous. The light and weather conditions differ also, ranging from sun with clouds on the left to overcast and cloudy on the right. In same-sized oil studies for the two outer panels--Vuillard made none for the narrower central one--the wintry park is deserted and the benches are empty.(9)

Vuillard took many photographs of Place Vintimille, from his fourth-floor windows beginning in 1909 and, after he moved in 1913, from the second floor of the same building. Because none of these photos is dated, only the different viewpoints indicate the approximate dates. Among the photos are two that have distinct affinities with the Bernstein panels. The pair match the compositions of the left and right panels in the trio, and it is likely that Vuillard used the photographs as aides-memoires. He was no stranger to the camera: in 1895 he began to use a simple Kodak camera to take snapshots of friends and family to serve in preparing his small interior paintings.(10)

When photographing the outdoor motif from the fourth floor, Vuillard had to contend with certain technical limitations. His lens could not encompass all the elements from the sky down to the sidewalk that he included in the paintings. Wide-angle lenses were not yet available, so he could photograph the entire width of the park only segment by segment. The width, though not the height, of each painted panel corresponds to the camera's narrow range.

Vuillard used the medium of distemper, or peinture a la colle, for these works, a technique he had initiated in 1893-94 with The Park and, though somewhat modified, in his theater backdrops of the same time. Instead of binding pigments with oil, Vuillard combined them with hot glue and water. He boiled the glue and water for many hours, then mixed the powdered pigments with this liquid, keeping the solution warm to prevent thickening. The fast-drying distemper required quick application and, for areas of correction, a reworking with newly mixed colors. Although this method was time-consuming and difficult, Vuillard liked the resultant matte and crusty surface that evoked painting on stone.(11)