Edouard Vuillard: Misia et Vallotton à Villeneuve

Edouard Vuillard (French, 1868-1940), *Misia et Vallotton à Villeneuve,* signed and dated ‘E Vuillard. 99’ (upper right), oil on board laid down on cradled panel, 27 5/8 x 20 1/8 in. (70.2 x 51.1 cm.), Painted in 1899, Image Source: Christie’s

““I have always been shy in your presence, but the security, the assurance of a perfect understanding relieved me of all embarrassment; nothing was lost by this understanding being a wordless one.” So wrote the typically reticent Vuillard, with unexpected candor, to the prodigiously charismatic and alluring Misia Natanson, his perennial muse and the object of his unrequited infatuation during the last years of the nineteenth century. Vuillard’s enchantment with Misia, who constituted the very epicenter of Paris’s most advanced artistic and literary circle at this time, finds its most poignant and intimate expression in the present interior, a polyphony of color and texture that represents both a lyric sublimation of the artist’s intense emotions and a fantasy of his desires fulfilled. “Nowhere is Misia more beautiful than in this elaborate, elegant composition,” Guy Cogeval has declared (A. Salomon and G. Cogeval, op. cit., 2003, p. 502).

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