Édouard Vuillard was one of the most distinctive painters of late nineteenth-century French interior life, a founding member of the Nabis whose intimate, pattern-saturated scenes of the bourgeois household redefined what the small-scale domestic painting could do as art.
Édouard Vuillard (November 11, 1868 – June 21, 1940) was a French painter, printmaker, and decorative artist, and a founding member of the Nabis. Born in Cuiseaux and raised in Paris from the age of nine, he was educated at the Lycée Condorcet, where he met several of the writers and painters with whom he would build his early career, including Ker-Xavier Roussel and Maurice Denis, and trained as a painter at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts from 1886 to 1888. In 1889 he joined the small group of young painters who had broken from the Académie Julian to call themselves the Nabis ("Prophets" in Hebrew), a circle that included Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Sérusier, Roussel, and Félix Vallotton.
Through the 1890s he developed the body of intimate domestic interiors, closely observed scenes of his mother's dressmaking workshop and the apartments of his bourgeois Parisian friends, for which he and Bonnard became known as the Intimists. He helped found Aurélien Lugné-Poë's Symbolist Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1893, designing sets and programs alongside his painting practice, and in the decades after the Nabis dispersed in 1900 he produced an extensive body of portrait commissions, decorative cycles for private patrons and public buildings, and the intimate studio portraits of his fellow Nabis friends, Bonnard, Denis, Roussel, and the sculptor Aristide Maillol, that occupied the last fifteen years of his life. His work is held in essentially every major museum of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting, including the Musée d'Orsay, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.