Édouard Vuillard: An Intimist

Édouard Vuillard – The Album – 1895 – Oil on Canvas - 26 3/4 x 80 1/2 in. (67.9 x 204.5 cm) – Metropolitan Museum of Art (click photo for larger image)French Symbolist painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was a member of the Symbolist group known as Les Nabis (from the Hebrew and Arabic term for "prophets" and, by extension, the artist as the "seer" who reveals the invisible). However, he was less drawn to the mystical aspects of the group and more attracted to fashionable private venues, where philosophical discussions about poetry, music, theatre, and the occult occurred. Because of his preference for painting interior and domestic scenes, Vuillard is often referred to as an "intimist".

The work featured here is best described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

In 1894–95, Thadée and Misia Natanson commissioned from Vuillard a series of five decorative panels known collectively as "The Album." The unusual character of these works matched that of the Natansons' Paris apartment, a large open space adjoined by several small alcove areas. Its unconventional decor reflected Misia's taste, which was inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement. The apartment often served as an alternative office for Thadée's lively avant-garde journal, "La Revue blanche." Among the contributors to this influential publication were Claude Debussy, Léon Blum, Stéphane Mallarmé, and André Gide. The evocative Symbolist qualities of Mallarmé's poetry and Debussy's music find echoes in Vuillard's five panels, which take their name from this painting.

You can read more about the Symbolists and Vuillard on this site. Just search “Symbolists” and “Vuillard” and you find several articles of interest.

Jan Verkade: Dutch Post Impressionist and Symbolist

Jan Verkade - Decorative Landscape - 1891 - Oil on panel - Nationalmuseum - Stockholm (click photo for larger image)Jan Verkade (a/k/a Johannes Sixtus Gerhardus Verkade) (1868-1946) was a pivotal Dutch Post-Impressionist artist and a talented Christian Symbolist painter. His spiritual journey eventually led him to become a Benedictine monk, and he continued painting throughout his religious career.

In the work featured here, it is very easy to see the influence of Paul Gauguin. In his earlier days, he was closely associated with the Les Nabis group of artists.

Pierre Bonnard: Simple Scenes in Outstanding Color

Pierre Bonnard - The Letter - 1906 - Oil on canvas - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a member of the group known as Les Nabis (prophets or seers) which was part of the broader group of Symbolists. Les Nabis painters subscribed to a doctrine of abandoning three-dimensional modeling in favor of flat color areas.

Although Bonnard was a member of this group, he was not interested in obscure Symbolist subject matter and was not a mystic. Rather, he took delight in painting the scenes of simple daily life that surrounded him. Color was an end in itself for him—a way of experiencing the world. He would sometimes go back and touch up his other paintings with a new color he’d formulated. He even once persuaded his friend, artist Édouard Vuillard, to distract one of the guards in a museum while he touched up a work that had been completed years before!

Alphonse Osbert - A Poetic Visual Language

Alphonse Osbert - The Muse at Sunrise - 1918 - Oil on wood - Private collection (click photo for larger image)Alphonse Osbert (1857–1939) was a French Symbolist painter who was educated at the École des Beaux Arts. Although he was initially an admirer of the great Spanish masters—his style moved away from the academic when he became inspired by the Post-Impressionists and other Symbolists, such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Osbert abandoned naturalistic painting and took up a Pointillist technique similar to that used by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. He developed a signature style characterized by unearthly light, and ghostlike muses in mysterious landscapes.

Ferdinand Hodler: Synthesizing Art Nouveau and Symbolism

Ferdinand Hodler - The Night - 1889-1890 - Oil on canvas - 116x299 cm - Berne Kunstmuseum (click photo for larger image)Art Nouveau artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was one of the most important painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Although in his early years he produced portraits heavily influenced by the French Realist Gustave Courbet, by the mid-1880s Hodler leaned toward works from which a more deliberate linear self-stylization emerged. His subjects also began to deal with the symbolism of youth and age, solitude, and contemplation.  

In the work featured here, Die Nacht (The Night) the painter portrays himself as having been rudely awakened by the figure of death. Around him are entwined men and women, asleep, with self-portraits slipped in along with portraits of the two women with whom Hodler shared his life at that time: Augustine Dupain, his companion since the early days and mother of his son, and Bertha Stuckie, his wife from a brief and tempestuous marriage.