Dear Friends,

I’d like to draw your attention to three very fine works in our collection by Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) and Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940). Despite their different styles, these two artists were both associated with the Nabis, a group of young Symbolist painters in late-19th-century Paris. Taking their name from the Hebrew word for prophet, the Nabis embraced pattern and ornament, flat, bright colors, and simplified, rhythmically arranged forms.

Swiss-born Vallotton trained as a painter at the Académie Julian in Paris. He had moved to Paris at sixteen years old, with aspirations to establish himself within the city’s vibrant art scene. Although he earned high praise for his painting, he began to experiment with woodcuts in 1891, producing compositions with remarkable delicacy and precision.

Vallotton’s virtuosity with woodcuts was apparent from his earliest works. He developed his own stylized visual language in which large areas of black predominate, as in Le Bain (The Bath), 1894. The work also exemplifies his love for the untouched block. In it, the maid, ready with a towel for her mistress, and the generously curving bathtub bleed into the black background wall, differentiated only by spare white outlines. Vallotton would extend the visual restraint of this private scene to his celebrated 1897–98 series, Les Intimités (Intimacies), including ten woodcuts of scenes of seduction and betrayal set in starkly outlined domestic settings.

Impressed with his woodcuts and paintings, the Nabis invited Vallotton to join their group in the early 1890s. They dubbed him the "Foreigner Nabi" for his Swiss origins.

Of Vuillard, author André Gide wrote in 1905:

"[Vuillard] is the most personal, the most intimate of story-tellers. I know few pictures which bring the observer so directly into the conversation with the artist....M. Vuillard speaks almost in a whisper—as is only right when confidences are being exchanged—and we have to bend over towards him to hear what he says."

Vuillard joined the Nabis in 1889. He brought their aesthetic to paintings and drawings devoted to the people closest to him: his mother, sister, and other family members and friends in his intimate social circle. As he once said, “the subject of any work is an emotion simple and natural to the author.”

Demoiselle en rouge (Young Lady in Red), 1893, reflects Vuillard’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints. The young lady’s body forms the subtle S-curve characteristic of the women depicted in these prints. Recalling a bright kimono, her flecked dress accentuates her curving form. The varied patterns throughout the composition, as well as its soft geometric planes and abstract areas, are emblematic of Vuillard’s works from the early 1890s.

The artist’s sister fills the space in Marie Vuillard sur sa chaise, penchée (Marie Vuillard in Her Chair, Leaning), 1891–92. Marie was one of the central protagonists in Vuillard’s family pictures. He made this portrait the year before she married, but with her long, pale face, hunched posture, and hands clutching her black dress, she seems almost like a caricature of a spinster.