Symbolism   •   Edouard Vuillard @ Wikipedia

Like his older brother, Édouard Vuillard was supposed to go into military service. Reasonable would have been a decision for the service in the French army: For the young Vuillard lost his father at the age of 20. The mother had to watch how she got along with her family. She worked as a worker in a corset workshop and made for a modest living of the family. But as a high school student Édouard associated with musicians and painters and decided during his frequent visits to the Louvre for an artistic career.

It was supposed to be motifs from his mother's working-class milieu and domestic scenes that would make Édouard famous a few years later in the 1890s. In the main, he was modeled on his mother and sister modeled in patterned wallpaper. "I do not do portraits. I paint people at home, "Édouard Vouillard said of his interiors. His two-dimensional representations of people appear to be interwoven with the background. André Guide described Vouillard's style as intimism.

The tendency to abstraction developed Vouillard 1888/89, when he joined the Nabis, a rebellious group of young art students in Paris. According to the "méthode synthésiste" of its founder Paul Sérusier, Vouillard painted more from memory and his own imagination.

Vouillard also made a name for himself as a theater decorator when designing sets for Ibsen, Strindberg and Maeterlinck. He also designed large-scale decorative panels depicting public gardens. As an artist, he remained active until 1930. © Meisterdrucke