RICE UNIVERSITY

EDOUARD VUILLARD'S "JARDINS PUBLICS":

THE SUBTLE EVOCATION OF A SUBJECT

by

EMILY JANE BALLEW

A THESIS SUBMITTED

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE

MASTER OF ARTS

APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE

Dr. William A. Camfield, Professor Director Department of Art and Art History

Associate n-otessor Department of Art and Art Historv

Assistant Professor Department of Art and Art History Copyright Emily Jane Ballew 1990 Abstract

Edouard Vuillard's "Jardins publics": The Subtle Evocation of a Subject

Emily Jane Ballew

In 1894, the Nabi painter Edouard Vuillard completed his second large scale decorative commission for the Alexandre Natanson home on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The commission, later titled Jardins publics, included nine paintings now dispersed. This series, in which a traditional approach to decorative painting and typical Salon devices are combined with Symbolist thematic innovations, provides a complex and rich foundation for discussing two points raised by the series. First, Jardins publics provides a valuable historical testament to the transformation of the late nineteenth-century public park from an exclusively aristocratic playground to an open, democratic space. Second, the series may be read as a veiled illusion to the frequently used Symbolist life cycle theme, where social and psychological problems of different ages and classes in Parisian society are addressed by the artist. Acknowledgements

This project would not have been realized but for the following people whose generosity I would like to acknowledge:

William A. Camfield, my thesis advisor, for his patience, encouragement, advice, and friendship; Virginia Camfield, who, while I was in Paris, saw me through the grippe with tea, and an expert camera lesson; George T. M. Shackelford, who introduced me to his colleagues Elizabeth W. Easton and Gloria Groom, both Vuillard scholars whose generosity and enthusiasm have been overwhelming and inspiring; Gregg Most, for his cheerful help with slides and photography; John Hallam, for his guidance in research; Lorri Lewis, for her office space and equipment; Shannon L. Halwes, for her sharp and consistently witty remarks and computer assistance; and Celia M. Lewis, my Paris guide and philosopher/friend. Finally, I am grateful to my parents, siblings, and, as always, Richard. List of Figures

Figure 1. Placement of Paintings in the Natanson Household. Scheme based on notes and sketches made by Edouard Vuillard; published in Gaire Frèches-Thory, "Jardins publics de Vuillard," Revue de Louvre 29 no. 4 (1979), 305-312.

Figure 2. Les Deux écoliers, 1894. distemper, 841/2 x 37 3/4 in., Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgiques, Belgium.

Figure 3. Sous les arbres, 1984, distemper, 841/2 x 37 3/4 in., Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Figure 4. Fillettes jouant, 1894, distemper, 84 1/2 x 33 1/8 in., Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 5. L'Interrogatoire, 1894, distemper, 84 1/2 x 37 3/4 in., Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 6. Les Nourrices, 1894, distemper, 84 1/2 x 28 3/8 in., Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 7. La Conversation, 1894, distemper, 841/2 x 59 7/8 in., Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 8. L'Ombrelle rouge, 1894, distemper, 84 1/2 x 311/2 in., Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 9. La Promenade, 1894, distemper, 841/2 x 37 3/4 in., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.

Figure 10. Les Premiers pas, 1894, distemper, 841/2 x 26 3/8 in., present location unknown.

Figure 11. Prepatory drawings for Jardins publics made by Edouard Vuillard; published in Claire Frèches-Thory, supra, fig. 1.

Figure 12. Puvis de Chavannes, Le Bois sacré, 1884-89, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

Figure 13. L'Offrande du couer, early 16th century, tapestry, Musée des Thermes and l'Hôtel de Cluny, Paris, France.

Figure 14. Dame à la licorne, late 15th century, tapestry, Musée des Thermes and l’Hôtel de Cluny, Paris, France.

Figure 15. La Vie seigneuriale (La Promenade), early 16th century, tapestry, Musée des Thermes and l’Hôtel de Quny, Paris, France.

Figure 16. Partial map of Paris showing location of Vuillard's home; published in Karl Baedeker, Paris and Its Environs, 1907.

Figure 17. Partial map of Paris highlighting Square de la Trinité and rue Pigalle; supra, fig. 16. Figure 18. Map of Paris highlighting the Bois de Boulogne, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Square de la Trinité, Jardin du Luxembourg, Bois de Vincennes and Parc Monceau; published in Karl Baedeker, Paris and Its Environs, 1900.

Figure 19,20. Late nineteenth-century photographs of Tuileries Gardens. Album 4 10, Paris et ses environs, 1890, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, France.

Figure 21. Tum-of-the-century postcard of Bois de Boulogne (postmarked 1906).

Figure 22. Sheet of prepatory studies for Jardins publics made by Edouard Vuillard, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Figure 23. Studies and notes from Vuillard's journals, July 1894. Bibliothèque de l'Institut, Paris, France.

Figure 24. Mid nineteenth-century print of track at Bois by Guérard; published in Bernard Champigneulle, Paris: architecture, sites, et jardins, Paris, 1975.

Figure 25. Champ d'entrainement, Bois de Boulogne; published in B. de Saint-Pol Lias, "Le Bois de Boulogne," Le Monde Moderne (July, 1899), 47-64.

Figure 26. Late nineteenth-century photograph of area near Moulin de l'Abbaye, Bois de Boulogne. Album 4 10, Paris et ses environs, 1890, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, France.

Figure 27,28. Late nineteenth-century photographs of area near Moulin de l'Abbaye, Bois de Boulogne. Album 4 15, H. Blancard, Paris, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, France.

Figure 29. Moulin de Longchamp, Bois de Boulogne; published in B. de Saint-Pol Lias, supra, fig. 25.

Figure 30. Edouard Manet, The Races at Longchamp, c. 1867, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

Figure 31. Plan of the Tuileries at the time of Le Nôtre; published in Marcel Poète, Au jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 1924.

Figure 32. Children playing in the Tuileries, 1869; published in Georges Fath, Le Paris des enfants, Paris, 1869.

Figure 33. La Terrasse des Feuillants, Tuileries, after Muller, c. 1800.

Figure 34. Map of the Bois de Boulogne; supra, fig. 18.

Figure 35. Cascade at the Bois de Boulogne; published in Richard Whiteing, Living Paris and France, London, 1886.

Figure 36. Placing Bets, Le Champs des courses de Longchamp, 12 June 1870; published in Marianne Gilbert, Le Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 1958.

Figures 37,38. The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1886; published in Whiteing, supra, fig. 35.

vi Figure 39. The Bois de Boulogne, 1886; published in Whiteing, supra, fig. 35.

Figure 40. Boating at the Bois de Boulogne, 1869; published in Fath, supra, fig. 32.

Figure 41. Nineteenth-century print of the Square de la Trinité; published in Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris, Paris, 1867-73.

Figure 42. Nineteenth-century photograph of the Square de la Trinité. Album 4 3, Paris et ses environs, 1890, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, France.

Figure 43. Paris, Hôtel Brunoy, drawing by Maréchal, after 1774, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; published in Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France, Princeton, 1978.

Figure 44. Paris, Cours la Reine, from the engraving by Aveline, c. 1700, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; published in Mark Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History, New Haven, 1985.

Figure 45. Israel Silvestre, The Fountain of Fame at Versailles, 1682; published in Guy Walton, Louis XIV's Versailles, Middlesex, 1986.

Figure 46. Women conversing in the Tuileries, 1692; published in Marcel Poète, supra, fig. 31.

Figure 47. Jean-Antoine Watteau, Gathering in a Park, 1717, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

Figure 48. Edouard Manet, Musique aux Tuileries, 1862, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London, England.

Figure 49. James Tissot, Sans Dot (Without a Dowry), 1883-85, oil on canvas, Toronto, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph M. Tannenbaum.

Figure 50. Claude Monet, Tuileries Gardens, 1876, oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan, France.

Figure 51. Claude Monet, Femmes au jardin, 1867, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 52. Edgar Degas, Chevaux des courses, devant les Tribunes, c. 1866-68, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 53. Berthe Morisot, The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne, 1879, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London, England.

Figure 54. Late nineteenth-century photograph of garden-goers; Album 4 3, Paris et ses environs, 1890, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, France.

Figure 55. Early twentieth-century postcard of garden-goers, Tuileries (postmarked 1906).

Figure 56. Tum-of-the-century postcard of Tuileries.

Figure 57. Maurice Denis, Muses, 1893, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.

Figure 58. Pierre Bonnard, The Croquet Game, 1892, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. vn Figure 59. Pierre Bonnard, Promenade des nourrices, frise des fiacres, 1894, distemper, private collection.

Figure 60. Ker Xavier-Roussel, Les Quatre saisons, 1892, oil on canvas, private collection, Paris, France.

Figure 61. Ker Xavier-Roussel, Causerie au jardin, 1893-94, oil on canvas, private collection, Paris, France.

Figure 62, 63. Vuillard’s panels for the Desmarais', 1892, oil on canvas, private collection.

viii Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv List of Figures v

Preface ix 1. Setting the Stage 1 2. Social Life is Going Through A Great Evolution 40

3. Je ne suis pas indifferent au sujet 80

Bibliography 114 Preface

For more than forty-five years, decorative wall painting captivated the attention of the French painter, Edouard Vuillard. For Vuillard, and other late nineteenth-century artists, art was not restricted to easel pictures or works in traditional media such as canvas and marble, but extended to the decorative arts. While Vuillard designed dinnerware, a poster and other graphic works, glass for Tiffany, theatrical scenery and programs, and collaborated with friends on puppet shows, none of these held his interest longer than paintings created for a private residence or a public building. Until recently, a thorough investigation of Vuillard's early decorative works has been sorely missing in the literature on the artist. Gloria Groom, in her doctoral dissertation "Painting as Decoration for the Domestic Interior: Edouard Vuillard's Patrons and Projects, 1892-1901," has added immeasurably to Vuillard scholarship by producing the first study devoted solely to his decorative paintings and the patrons who commissioned them. Elizabeth Easton has recently published another significant contribution with her exhibition catalogue, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard. Her study of Vuillard's interiors brings new insight to the artist's manipulation of viewpoint and perspective for expressive purposes. Belinda Thomson's recent monograph on the artist, published in 1988, provides a thorough overview of Vuillard's oeuvre, highlighting his talent as a landscape artist and his later period works, both topics frequently ignored by art historians. Together, these studies make important inroads into the understanding of the artist and his oeuvre. While the scope of my present project is considerably narrower than the comprehensive studies listed above, I hope to enrich our understanding of Vuillard's work by focusing on only one of many commissions Vuillard executed during his life: Jardins publics, Vuillard's second large scale decorative commission. In the series, Vuillard delights the eye with his customary use of pattern, delicate color harmonies, seemingly spontaneous break-up of the picture plane, and overall surface beauty. The general purpose of this paper is to offer a new interpretation of Vuillard's Jardins publics, taking into consideration Vuillard's journals (still unpublished but made available to me at the library of the Institut de France) and the latest scholarship on the artist. Chapter One provides a general background of Vuillard's art, life and approach to painting, as well as a visual analysis of the panels of Jardin publics, and brief comments concerning Vuillard's direct sources of inspiration. Chapter Two concentrates on public parks in Paris. I identify and discuss some of the parks Vuillard synthesized into a backdrop for the series. At the same time, I include historical, political, and socio¬ cultural background information on nineteenth-century public park ideology and show how some of these concepts are embedded in Vuillard's series. Chapter Three discusses the subject of Jardins publics and concludes with the major point of emphasis: that Jardins publics provides a valuable historical testament to the transformation of the late nineteenth-century public park from an exclusively aristocratic playground to an open, democratic space. Further, the series may be read as a veiled illusion to the frequently used Symbolist life cycle theme, where social and psychological problems of different ages and classes in Parisian society are addressed by the artist.

x 1

"'What I should like/ said Julien, 'would be to tell the story-no, not of a person, but of a place—well, for instance, of a garden path...just tell what happens in it from morning til evening. First of all, come the children's nurses and the children, and the babies' nurses with ribbons in their caps...No, no...first of all, people who are grey all over and ageless and sexless and who come to sweep the path, and water the grass, and change the flowers—in fact, to set the stage and get ready the scenery before the opening of the gates...."

- André Gide, The Counterfeiters 2

Chapter I Setting the Stage Background When the Dutch Nabi painter Jan Verkade exclaimed "the painter's work begins when the architect decides that his work is finished. Give us walls and more walls to decorate!," he revealed a burgeoning trend in late nineteenth-century Paris to replace traditional easel pictures with wall painting which would, according to the critic Georges-Albert Aurier, "decorate with thoughts, dreams and ideas the banal walls of human edifices."1 In general, Symbolist painters of the time favored color and form as a means of evoking sensations, and rejected materialism and scientific thought which had, Aurier believed, "unhinged the constellations."2 Through wall decoration, Aurier hoped that Symbolism, a movement concentrating upon the inner life of the mind and its relationship to outward stimuli, would redeem or at least elevate the condition of man which he thought had fallen to an all-time low late in the century. As Aurier further reported: "The easel picture is nothing but an illogical refinement invented to satisfy the fantasy or the commercial spirit in decadent civilizations."3 Although the branch of the Symbolist movement of painters calling themselves the Nabis (the name derived from the Hebrew word for "prophet") may not have agreed wholeheartedly with Aurier's doomsday philosophy, members did respond actively to the trend for wall painting while never eschewing the easel. For the Nabi painter Edouard Vuillard, the opportunity to decorate walls for a domestic setting came in 1892 at the age of twenty-four, and through the friendship of his fellow school classmates, the 3

Natansons, who arranged for Vuillard to paint in frieze-like form several panels for their cousins' home.4 The Natanson brothers were the sons of a Jewish/Polish investment banker from Warsaw who brought his family to Paris in 1876. All three of the Natanson brothers, Alexandre (1864-1935), Thadée (1868-1951), and Alfred (1874-1927) were founders of the avant-garde, liberal publication La Revue Blanche, a magazine which sought "to cultivate rather than promote" the newest in literature, theatre, music and painting, and whose staff was not restricted to a select literati, but a collection of people from various social and economic backgrounds and political persuasions.6 It is through this alliance with La Revue Blanche that Vuillard was commissioned to execute not only a cover illustration for the magazine in 1893, but various decorative commissions for the Natansons. The Natanson family, then, was responsible for launching Vuillard's decorative painting career. Alexandre and Olga (née Kahn) Natanson commissioned Vuillard at the sum of 800 francs to execute nine panels, the series known as Jardins publics completed in 1894, for their new home in Paris' most fashionable district, the sixteenth arrondissement.6 Alexandre had chosen a law and business profession and ultimately achieved the same level of financial success as his father and brothers. For Alexandre, as it would have been for his industrialist cousins the Desmarais and other Jewish patrons who generally favored works from avant-garde artists, commissioning a work for his home would have been, according to Gloria Groom, a "cultural and social investment" that would have reminded his visiting houseguests of his worldly success.7 4

Alexandre's acquisition points out the immense philosophical distance between the patron and the critic, such as Aurier. Simply stated, while one commissioned the work as a sign of personal success within a rigid hierarchical social structure in late nineteenth-century Paris, the other, who would interpret it, felt wall painting was closer to man's most primitive and basic instincts and therefore non-commercial and non-decadent. The artist who would paint it, in this instance Vuillard, desired to conform to traditions of French decorative painting while bringing his own Symbolist experience to the task.8 Like other Symbolist painters, Vuillard was faithful to the concept of the importance of the inner life of the mind, most evident in the work of his fertile decade in the 1890's. In 1890, he wrote that "nothing is important save the spiritual state one is in to be able to subjectify his thought to a sensation [and] to think only of the sensation all the while searching for the means of expression."9 Vuillard also favored individualism in his attitude toward artistic theories. While Vuillard was influenced by theories, he was not a slave to them. He wrote to Maurice Denis once, "I have a horror, or rather, a cold fear of general ideas that I have not myself deduced."10 Nonetheless, Vuillard had his "spiritual" mentors. Instead of concentrating on the legacy of Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard like his fellow artists at the Académie Julian, he studied the masters in the Louvre, or at least those artists with whom he felt a special kinship such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Antoine Watteau, whose dignity and charm in portraying everyday, ordinary events appealed to him.11 Unlike Denis and Paul Sérusier who "painted from theories," Vuillard relied on direct observation of scenes of daily life and 5 artists who inspired him as a means of finding a plastic expression for thoughts and sensations.12 He even admits "I have never been anything but a spectator."13 Vuillard's brand of flâneur is of a kind typical in the late nineteenth century and described by Charles Rearick: "In fin-de-siècle Paris, the flâneur was not so much the dandy out to make himself seen, not so much the flamboyant individualist that Baudelaire presented, as the connoisseur of the city's finer mundane delights."14 Vuillard's gift was his ability to transform scenes of everyday life into timeless and elegant outdoor, indoor and still-life paintings whose success depended on finding a "direct connection between what is observed [by the artist], 'what is,' and what is depicted by the arrangement of colors and lines on the canvas."15 As Elizabeth Easton holds, unlike Denis who felt that the arrangement of colors in a specific order preceded the issue of subject matter, Vuillard believed in the opposite approach which addressed subject matter before arranging it into colors and lines.16 Perhaps it is this initial introspection that lends Vuillard's work greater psychological depth by comparison to some of his contemporaries. In the following discussion of the artist's life, three aspects of it will be touched upon: his exposure at first hand to political movements and activities of the day through his association with the Revue Blanche crowd, private commentaries in his journals, and finally his active involvement with Symbolist theatre. These topics deserve special mention because they directly affect the interpretation of Vuillard's Jardins publics. Vuillard, the son of a bureaucratic father and a mother twenty-seven years younger than her husband, moved with his family to Paris from his 6 home in Cuiseaux (Bourgogne) where he was born in 1868.17 By the time he was eleven years old, Vuillard's mother had established a corsetmaking business which became the primary source of family income after her husband died in 1884.18 It is not surprising that many of the patterns and motifs in Vuillard's paintings derive from his experience of living in a household full of cloth, patterns, lace, seamstresses and women’s "shop- talk."19 Immediately outside his home, located at the corner of rue Saint- Honoré and rue d'Alger near the Place Vendôme, were the trappings of a very feminine world, with shops carrying the "smartest and most expensive fashions, perfumes, silks, jewels, furs, hats, and lingerie."20 The rue Saint- Honoré catered to the wealthiest shoppers but was also populated with busy merchants and workers.21 Vuillard's immediate environment was a merging of the two, both inside his home with well-to-do clients and laboring seamstresses, and outside where consumer and worker comingled. The young artist's exposure to a variety of social classes within Parisian society both inside and outside his home is important to our understanding of the artist. Some art historians in the past have depicted Vuillard as a self- satisfied bourgeois with little social conscience. For example, John Russell believes "it is rare to find a servant in his [Vuillard's] pictures; painting, for him, was a mode of exchange between social equals."22 Or, in a comparison between Vuillard and the playwright Henrik Ibsen for whom Vuillard designed stage sets, Mario Amaya states "the fact that many of the plays were by Ibsen is curious, for whereas Ibsen focused on social and psychological problems of the bourgeoisie in the light of a changing society, Vuillard never delved into problems but always showed the good life that such a closed, self- 7 satisfied society held to, despite the social revolutions that were taking place around it."23 Recent investigations of Vuillard's works have reversed or modified these proclamations. It is now known that Vuillard included figures from various social classes, and although he and his fellow Nabis were not usually demonstrative spokesmen for social issues, Vuillard expressed concern with the working class.24 Vuillard's concern was likely more than surface deep since it developed out of personal experience. There is some evidence to suggest that Vuillard's mother may have been a union member of the clothing industry in 1892.25 Certainly his experience of growing up surrounded by seamstresses would have made him aware of labor concerns even if his mother was not a union member. Vuillard was a co-founding member with his friend Aurélian Lugné- Poë of the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, and reputedly invented the theatre's name, part of which evoked an association with the working class.26 As the art historian George Mauner points out, the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre "mostly describes the 'work of art,' but also suggests 'work' in a humbler sense, an impression heightened by [the theatre's] ...circular seal representing a laborer in the streets of Paris."27 Vuillard, in an unusual display of public assertiveness, also held strong views on the Dreyfus case. The Dreyfus case, one of the most pressing political events of the 1890's, began as a lawsuit concerning possible army infiltration and evolved into a heated public debate which provoked a disturbing eruption of anti-Semitism. Upon hearing of Dreyfus' conviction as a traitor to France, Vuillard, an ardent Dryfusard, wept for his country.28 While Vuillard's reaction may seem dramatic to modern eyes, it points out nonetheless his strong stand against the prevailing, popular 8 attitude, something many historians and critics did not formally associate with the artist. These few of many possible examples challenge the validity of previous historians' opinions concerning Vuillard and his fellow Nabis as self-interested, unaware bourgeois artists. During the 1880's and 1890's, Vuillard would never have advocated a self-satisfied society; he was too thoroughly involved with progressive groups of intellectuals such as those of La Revue Blanche, the Théâtre Libre and Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, together an extraordinary mix of anarchists, dissidents, and even some with conservative political convictions.29 If anything, his involvement shows an enlightened commitment to an open and tolerent society. His worldliness may in part have been the result of his education as a scholarship student at the rigorous Lycée Condorcet, also attended by the Natansons, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Lugné-Poë, and later Marcel Proust.30 The Lycée Condorcet took day students, not boarders, a policy which fostered the school's reputation as a "happy mixture of the life of the classics and family and worldly life" in Paris.31 Rather than sequestered in more remote areas, the Lycée Condorcet was in the heart of Paris. Inside the school, education was based on Kantian philosophy, as it was in general in the lycée system, and, according to Easton, stressed the "supremacy of the individual, faith in perceptions as evidence of reality, belief in the relativity of truth, emphasis on the importance of observation and imagination, and use of analogy to strengthen a perceived truth."32 When we read Vuillard's journals, we can see that the strain of Kantian philosophy of his schooling profoundly influenced him. 9

In his journals, which contain sporadic but lengthy entries between 1888-90, in 1894 (the year he was working on the Natanson commission), and regularly after 1907, Vuillard reveals himself as an intellectual thinker and observer, and alternately passionate and plagued with self-doubt. At the time Denis was formulating and writing the "Définition du néo-traditionnisme," Vuillard's journals reflect his cautious response to his friend's postulations. Vuillard observed and recorded in the strictest detail what he saw in the park, on a street comer, or in his home. He also commented frequently on his mental health. Often, he remarked on the state of his nerves, and on whether the day was calm.33 His journals reveal thoughts of an inward-looking man fascinated by and analyzing the sensations he received from the shapes, colors, movements, and domestic events surrounding him. Although Vuillard was part of the Parisian intellectual elite, and lived in a politically eventful time, his journals do not mention political events or include biographical commentaries on his friends and acquaintances. For example, his entries during the summer months of 1894, a time in which Vuillard wrote frequently, do not include any observations or comments about changes in the outside world. The anarchist bomb explosions in Paris of the summer of 1894, among the catastrophic events of the decade, are not mentioned, an omission made even more surprising considering that the event was "close to home;" Felix Fénéon, an acquitted suspect in the bombing incidents, immediately began working on the editorial staff of La Revue Blanche and Vuillard would have been privy to the inside story of the event by his own close association with the staff of the magazine.34 Anarchism, an "intellectually fashionable" political point of view in the 1890s, was also 10 associated in the public's eye with Lugné-Poë's Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, the theatre with which Vuillard was closely associated.35 The audiences that the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre attracted were notorious because of the variety of interests they represented— from well-to-do worldly conservatives to bohemians and aesthetes, and women dressed to look like those in a Botticelli painting.36 Although Vuillard was either exposed to or involved with politics, theatre, and the mood of anarchism popular among his friends and acquaintances, none of the political and social issues of the day are present in his journals. Instead, Vuillard's observations of the physical world and concern with the act of painting take center stage in his private writings. While one expects or hopes to find Vuillard's innermost political thoughts spelled out in his journals, they simply are not there. But their absence in his journals does not exclude their presence in other areas of his life, with his association with the Revue Blanche milieu, his involvement with Symbolist theatre, and his painting. No description of Vuillard's background is complete without discussing his involvement in the theatre. In 1890, Vuillard, Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Lugné-Poë shared a studio at 28 rue de Pigalle where Vuillard became intimately involved with the theatre by designing a program announcement for the Théâtre Libre.37 Both the Théâtre Libre and Théâtre de l'Oeuvre attracted Vuillard as it did other Nabi painters. In 1891, Paul Ranson produced the Seven Princesses by Maurice Maeterlinck along with a medieval farce.38 Paul Sérusier designed the set, Denis, the costumes, and Vuillard conceived the setting for the medieval play.39 Lugné-Poë opened his avant-garde Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in 1893 with Ibsen's Romersholm for which 11

Vuillard had designed the set and the program.40 In true Maeterlinck fashion, Romersholm was performed almost entirely without physical action and full of long pauses and gazes out of a window.41 In other productions Lugné-Poë directed the actors to perform behind a veil or in shadow; in fact, Mauner believes the gauze may have been Vuillard's idea, in order to give the impression of "softened reality."42 The tenets of Symbolist theatre were known to Vuillard not only through his direct involvement with the theatre but through contact with his friend, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who exercised considerable influence on the formation of the Symbolist aesthetic in drama, which eschewed melodramatic gestures in favor of the subtle evocation of psychological tensions between characters.43 Vuillard’s belief regarding wall decoration, that "...la principale qualité d'une décoration murale consistait à ne pas s'imposer,..." is fully consistent with the basic aim of Symbolist theatre where the action on stage was not meant to impose itself on the audience but to be discovered and savored slowly.44 As we will see, the Symbolist aesthetic in drama provides a revealing context in which to begin reading Vuillard's panel series, Jardins publics, where subtle movements between garden-goers suggest psychological confrontations and allude to universal themes, while at the same time giving the viewer a close but not completely accurate picture of the late nineteenth-century public garden.

The Panels of the Natanson Commission A 1979 article in the Revue de Louvre featured Vuillard's previously unpublished drawings and prepatory sketches for Jardins publics.45 These sketches helped to answer a few of the questions associated with his panels, 12

1 Les Deux écoliers 2 Sous les arbres

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Figure 1 Placement of paintings in the Natanson Household now dispersed and owned by museums. The drawings established the order and arrangement of the panels in the Natanson household and included 13 pastel sketches and notes for several color schemes. Unfortunately, the drawings do not indicate the specific room where the works were to be located, a subject still debated. In the past, many historians including Jacques Salomon, a friend and chronicler of Vuillard's life and works, believed the panels were designed for the dining room in the Natanson's hotel-apartment at 60 Bois de Boulogne (now Avenue Foch).46 However, Claire Frèches-Thory believes the panels could also have been located in a room on the mezzanine floor, or a room contiguous to the dining room.47 Since the mid-twentieth century, the rooms have been considerably altered as a result of the German occupation of Paris and subsequent structural renovations. Therefore, the exact location of the panels remains unclear.48 According to Frèches-Thory, the panels were inserted into the wall.49 According to Vuillard's sketch of his installation plans, Vuillard arranged nine panels along four walls in three pairs and one triptych; the pairs and triptych were separated from one another by large wall spaces (fig. 1 for the following discussion). All panels are approximately 84 1/2 inches high but are of oddly varying widths. Paintings 1 and 2 (Les Deux écoliers and Sous les arbres) occupied one wall and have identical dimensions. Opposite these two was the triptych of Les Nourrices, La Conversation, and l'Ombrelle rouge (5, 6, 7). The large middle panel was flanked by two more slender panels of differing dimensions; l'Ombrelle rouge is not as wide as Les Nourrices. Vuillard placed Fillettes jouant and l'Interrogatoire (3 and 4) on either side of the entrance door to the room. Fillettes jouant has a lesser width than l'Interrogatoire just as in the pair opposite Les Premiers pas is not as wide as 14

Figure 2 Les Deux écoliers La Promenade (8 and 9). Paintings 8 and 9 were separated by a large window opposite the room's entrance door. The size of the window is unknown; 15 therefore the amount of light allowed to enter the room, like many other aspects of Jardins publics, is unclear. Since reproductions exclude important details or do not represent adequately Vuillard's colors, it is important to describe each panel in order to catalogue surface detail and reveal Vuillard's effort to suggest depth while conforming to the held formula of flatness for decorative painting. In Les Deux écoliers, two boys with their backs to the viewer (a common vantage point among the Nabis) appear to gaze through a thickly wooded and peopled garden space (fig. 2). The bottom half of the panel, predominantly realized in shades of brown and tan, contains the trunks of trees, the human figures, and curvilinear patterns of sunlight and shadow on the gravel parkground. Brightly patterned tree foliage and delicate limbs occupy the upper half of the panel which is mostly in shades of green touched with brown. The top of the panel shows hints of a light blue sky. The ground plane of Les Deux écoliers is tilted dramatically and allows a maximum of decorative effects in the execution of the speckled ground area and the protective umbrella of foliage. Vuillard has achieved a sense of both flatness and three-dimensionality. The trees stepping backward into space and the smaller figures in the background create the illusion of depth. However, Vuillard undermines the sensation of three dimensions by composing the panel in layers of horizontal strips stacked one on top of another so that the composition is flattened, and prevents the effect of creating a window into space, or hole in the wall, so to speak. Flatness is further emphasized by the lighter colored, almost lime green horizontal stretch of tiny leaves placed slightly above mid ground. The lowest curvilinear strip of dark shadow, 16 indicated by patches of light blue, pink, and brown, is topped by a lighter strip of sunlit space of light browns, olive green, and tan. This band contains the two figures of the schoolboys who bend and lean in gestures which suggest that they are playing hide-and-seek or are at least hiding from a mother or nanny in the distance. The third dark-shadowed band contains the "foreground" trunks of trees. The fourth sunlit stretch of space is unoccupied and separates the schoolboys from the background figures. The fifth strip contains a figure, two women conversing, a woman and child, and in the distance in black, perhaps a seated woman. The sunlit sixth strip reveals a strolling woman in black next to a row of red flowers and bushes. One more stretch of playground or "empty space" leads to the upper half of the painting which contains alternating strips of green leaves in various clearly defined patterns and shapes. The solitary young girl of Sous les arbres contrasts with the two jaunty schoolboys in its companion piece, Les Deux écoliers, on one of the long walls of the room (fig. 3). Again Vuillard stresses the flatness of the panel by organizing the composition in horizontal strips, and tilting the ground plane dramatically. This time the young girl, whose head is tilted shyly to the left and is dressed in a simple pinafore of sombre colors in grey and blue, occupies the third horizontal band. She almost merges with the tree trunk on her right which separates her from the seated bourgeois ladies. A chair and two tree trunks in the same band of shadow but farther into the distance distinguish the girl from the children playing in the sunlit strip above. The bright colored clothing of the children above her — red, blue, and striped blue and grey- further separates them from the dull colors of the hatless little girl of the 17

foreground. It is possible that the young girl in the foreground space is of a different social class than the elegant ladies to her right and well-groomed 18 children above her. The dull-colored clothes of some of Vuillard's figures in the panels possibly suggest people of a lower class, perhaps even orphans in uniform. Claude Roger-Marx has suggested that the young girl is participating in a game of hide-and-seek.50 Regardless of the activity, there is something melancholy yet compelling in Vuillard's portrayal of a young girl walking in awkward, hesitant steps. Beyond the band of playing children lies another shadow that contains two standing figures together and one alone. Above and beyond these figures are bands of various patterns of green leaves and few patches of blue sky. The lime green horizontal band of tiny leaves seen in Les Deux écoliers continues along this panel and visually links the two together despite the tangible space between them. Sparsely populated tree limbs extend horizontally from the right and meet the limbs extending from the left of Les Deux écoliers. In Fillettes jouant, as in the remainder of the panels, the layering of horizontal bands is only slightly apparent in the execution of background trees. The near absence of horizontal layering gives the panel the quality of a more open, relaxed space, free of a rigid horizontal structure. A large tree in the foreground separates the space between the viewer and the figures (fig. 4). The placement of the tree coincides with a seated woman dressed in an eggplant-colored dress in the foreground. It is difficult to discern whether the female dressed in a salmon-colored garment and matching hat accented with periwinkle blue is a young girl leaning towards the seated older woman or is a seated young woman, although I believe the latter to be more convincing. A young girl in light pink appears in the left background. The tree divides her 19

Figures 4 and 5 Fillettes jouant and L'Interrogatoire playing space with that of the two girls, one in red, the other in blue, who are holding hands and running across the picture plane. Behind all figures an island and horizontal band of trees yields to a monochromatic pale green sky. All figures are contained in the dark shadow except for the girl in red who intrudes upon the sunlit pathway. L'Interrogatoire, the companion piece to Fillettes jouant, shows a fashionable mother wearing black gloves bending towards the equally well- dressed young child whose red and white striped dress is bunched together perhaps by her tiny, nervous hands (fig. 5). An older girl dressed in dark pink with eggplant-colored stripes twirls around with her arms outstretched and her hair loose behind her. Another child dressed in olive-colored clothing 20 runs out of the picture plane towards the right. Two seated figures in the background punctuate the space between the pathway and the patterned green trees. All figures, in contrast to those of Fillettes jouant move in the sunlit space; very little of this space is comprised of shadow. A pale green sky occupies one-third of the picture plane. Les Nourrices is the most densely populated and active of all nine panels (fig. 6). The image of a young girl in a straw hat holding a baby is cropped by the picture plane. A nursemaid dressed in a purple blouse dotted with gold and a white apron leans toward the baby. A girl dressed in white sits at the feet of the straw-hatted woman and a boy wearing brown moves in front of the other nanny in a pose not unlike that of the schoolboy on the right of Les Deux écoliers. Two seated children play in front of the young boy. A baby carriage and toy horse mark the space immediately in front of a fence Vuillard has painted blue green. Behind the fence, an adult figure in black plays with children. The rest of the park contains sinuous shadows leading to more patterned trees. On the left green trees rise in the middle ground and lead to a light blue sky that contains traces of clouds. The largest panel of the entire series, La Conversation, is placed between the two smaller paintings (fig. 7). In contrast to the busy, well-to-do children's world of Les Nourrices, La Conversation shows three commonly- dressed women seated on a park bench, one holding a cream-colored umbrella which shades herself and a baby wrapped in a beige coverlet on her lap. Again Vuillard divides the space in half. Of all the panels, La Conversation contains the largest foreground space. The entire lower half of the panel contains alternating sunlit spaces and dark shadows which ooze 21

Figures 6, 7, 8 Les Nourrices, La Conversation, L’Ombrelle rouge diagonally across the picture plane. Above the brown, light blue, tan, and olive green patches of shadow and sun, three woman sit on a park bench situated on the left side of the panel. The woman on the right, one hand gloved, the other bare, leans in conversation toward her neighbors. Although her face is almost expressionless, the plump, middle figure leans back on the 22 bench with an expression of surprise on her face. The reaction of the mother on the left is obscured by the umbrella she carries. A blue green fence behind the threesome separates them from the field beyond which reveals on the far left a mother or nanny playing with children. A horizontal curving band of green trees blocks the space; one large tree in the background stands behind the seated women of the foreground. A light blue sky with white clouds reflects the amoeba like patterns on the parkground below.51 In addition to the large foreground space, La Conversation is the only panel containing dramatic clouds. The other panels, except for the two which complete the triptych, have monochromatic skies. In quiet contrast to the spirited figures of the children in Les Nourrices and even the chatty threesome of La Conversation sits the solitary older woman in l'Ombrelle rouge (fig. 8). She sits on a park bench with a small dog wearing a purple bow by her side. The woman wears a dark dress and a hat accented with light colored flowers and carries a red umbrella. A green blue fence separates her from a field which leads to a solid horizontal band of green trees. Tiny figures, extremely difficult to see even when viewed close up, stand directly in front of the fence. One larger tree, perhaps in the middle ground, takes up one-half of the light blue faintly cloudy sky. When viewed as a triptych, the old woman in profile sits directly across from the nurses and playing children of Les Nourrices in picture space. In La Promenade, a pink, blue, and brown dark shadow creeps into a sun-speckled area containing two girls, one holding a baby (fig. 9). A solitary girl in the middle ground looks behind her shoulder to two adult females in a background garden pathway. The sunlit area, the foreground shadow, and the 23

Figures 9, 10 La Promenade, Les Premiers pas human figures are contained in the lower half of the panel. The upper half contains an empty field, a blue green fence, and highly patterned green foliage 24 and trees. Unlike the other panels whose tree trunks are painted in shades of brown and perhaps shaded by other colors, Vuillard has extended the dotted pattern of green down the trunk. Also, the trees in this panel are more varied than those of the others; one contains vines of leaves which cascade downward like a willow tree. The two young girls and baby in the foreground, their backs to the viewer, gaze toward the girl in the middle ground and two adult women. The older girl dressed in grey holds a baby and stands with her feet placed apart. Her companion in blue, perhaps shy, does not keep her shoulders straight but hunches slightly forward. The solitary girl wearing a blue and white patterned dress takes hesitating steps toward the threesome but looks over her shoulder at the adults. The adult females are an ensemble of opposites. One faces the viewer with an open umbrella; the other has her back turned, her umbrella closed and pointed toward the ground. The two foreground girls wearing simple clothing appear to be of a different social class than the solitary girl in her lively-patterned blue and white dress. The island of trees in La Promenade is completed in Les Premiers pas, the only missing panel of the entire series of Jardins publics (fig. 10). A well- dressed bourgeois girl slightly cropped from the picture plane and her back to the viewer witnesses the first steps of the small boy. Stout nannies wearing aprons seated in the background are placed next to the garden pathway which recedes sinuously into the distance. In all panels, Vuillard suggests light through the contrast of light and dark colors of the ground. For example, the pinkish tan ground shadows are areas where the sun has penetrated; the darker patches do not receive sunlight. He also hints at a light source in the effect of sunlight on the figures' 25 garments. The white pattern on the shirt worn by the boy in Les Deux écoliers suggests a penetrating ray of light when contrasted with the dark grey pattern around his shoulders, an area of shadow. Also, the dress of the solitary girl in La Promenade is highlighted in white on the left side where the sun reaches it. But these allusions to a light source are subtle. The sense of light mostly comes from the paint itself and the allusions to a light source through the contrast of decorative shadows and sunlit areas. As an example of texture and brushwork, La Promenade reveals a variety of both. It appears Vuillard first painted the bottom half of the canvas brown and then painted over the first layer. The matte surface is not completely smooth but contains drips and thick areas of impasto in contrast to other areas of watery thin application of paint. The auburn hair of the older girl holding the baby is worked up into a thick mass of paint; her companion in blue has only the faintest wash of brown for hair. Vuillard synthesizes into one panel a combination of precise, clearly delineating brushstrokes for the blue, green, olive and brown foliage, and sketchy, suggestive strokes for the human figures and ground. Brushstrokes for foliage are numerous, even and exact in contrast to the economy in the application of paint for the figures. For example, in La Promenade, patches of brown, tan and olive green colors are juxtaposed to give the effect of dappled sunlight. One or two wide strokes of beige paint suggest a calf in the leg of the older girl in grey. The grey and brown brushstrokes used for the girl’s shoes are so slight it is impossible to determine the point where the shoe ends and the ground begins. Human figure merges with its environment. The hand of the girl in blue is barely suggested as is the adult woman's face portrayed in a 26 combination of black, brown, and beige patches of color. Yet despite the elimination of these details, Vuillard includes others such as a black button on a dress or the ribs of an umbrella. The figures appear transient in comparison to the trees and foliage which are conceived in solid, contained dots placed side by side in shades of green and yellow, or simply green. Vuillard’s varied brushstrokes result in a fusion of detail, as seen in the patterned trees, and suggestion, as seen in human figures, their gestures and movements. The matte surface of the panels was achieved through Vuillard's choice of medium, that of distemper. Distemper, or peinture à la colle, involves mixing pigment with glue before applying it to a surface.52 This medium was mostly used for painting theatrical sets because the matte finish it produced was compatible with harsh theatrical lights and the medium itself was inexpensive. (Vuillard admits he purchased his pigments ["les plus ordinaires"] from a corner druggist).53 It was not unusual for Vuillard to use distemper since other artists such as Denis and Roussel employed the same medium for "domestic frescoes."54 For Vuillard, this was the first time he used distemper for a domestic wall painting as he had painted with oils in his first commission. Dunstan notes that the advantages of distemper are several. The color dries quickly and allows the painter to work over the paint directly. Also, the colors do not turn yellow over time. But it was also a time consuming process. It would have been necessary for Vuillard to mix and remix, apply and reapply colors since the shade often differed when dried. In fact, the 27 paintings' extreme fragility today is a result of Vuillard's layering of paint; areas of surface impasto are now flaking.

A Brief Note on Sources Salomon states that none of Vuillard's figures was drawn entirely from memory but were based on careful observations of people in a public

Figure 11 Piepatory drawings for Jardins publics Drawings published by the Louvre Museum in 1979 attest to Vuillard's attention to factual detail and overall concern for composition (fig. 11). Figure 11 shows Vuillard's enlarged version of the hats worn by the woman and child of l'Interrogatoire and rearrangement of figures within a panel so that the bending woman leans toward rather than away from the door to the 28 room. He also wrote notes in the margin regarding the specific colors of the garments worn by his subjects. While direct sources for Vuillard's panels are difficult to determine and have already been discussed by other art historians, several of the likely influences should be mentioned.56 Undoubtedly, Vuillard, like the other Nabis, was enamored with Japanese prints and experimented with cropping the picture plane at asymmetrical intervals in Japanese fashion. Another influence on the Nabis was Pierre Pu vis de Chavannes, described as "the founder of modern French decorative art, having been the first to outline the formula for the necessary adaptation of painting to the walls...."57

Figure 12 Fuvis de Chavannes, Le Bois sacré, 1884-89 A closer look at Le Bois sacré by Puvis de Chavannes reveals Vuillard's affinity for his work (fig. 12). Although Vuillard’s figures do not have the sculptural plasticity of Puvis', he does accomplish the same quality of stillness despite the figures’ gestures of movement. After Puvis, Vuillard also uses 29 slender, pole like tree trunks to divide the space and create the illusion of depth by stepping them backwards and forwards in the picture plane.58 The delicate treatment of the leaves in skeletal outlines reoccurs in the clearly delineated foliage of Vuillard's. Most importantly, Vuillard, like Puvis, tilts the plane dramatically; the space is essentially flat but alludes to a third dimension. Vuillard parts ways with Puvis in the integration of figures with landscape. Where Vuillard's figures at times literally coincide with the environment, Puvis' are more solid and sculptural. The most important influence on Vuillard at the time he was working on the Natanson commission was his visit to Cluny, discussed in his journal entry of July 16,1894. His interest in medieval art was not new; Wolfgang Storch notes that Vuillard was inspired by medieval art for his set designs as early as 1891.59 According to his journal entry, Vuillard's contact with the tapestries inspired him to comment on the "sujets humbles de ces décorations de Cluny! Expression d'un sentiment intime sur une plus grande surface voilà tout."60 This comment shows that although Vuillard may have been affected by the profusion of foliage in tapestries such as the 15th century Dame à la licome, the 16th century l'Offrande du couer, or La Vie seigneuriale for the treatment of his leaves and trees of Jardins publics, he was more profoundly moved by the sentiment or feeling these "humble subjects" executed on a "large surface" evoked in him (figs. 13,14,15). Other technical details in the tapestries such as a flat plane and decorative patterns of carefully delineated leaves would have not been lost on Vuillard who would have responded to the medieval artist's delicate hand in rendering stylized shadow patterns, leaves and knobby trees as a background for quiet 30

Figure 13 L'Offrande du couer 31 human and animal movements. Vuillard must have been struck most in his visit to Cluny by the contrast between abundant and grand nature as a setting for "humble" rather than theatrically grand subjects, and the "intimate feelings" the juxtaposition of the two on a large surface was able to arouse in him. Vuillard perhaps discovered at Cluny that a large format does not preclude the sensation of intimacy.

Figure 14 Dame à la licorne Vuillard also observed and admired the same kind of subtlety in the tapestries that he found in Symbolist drama, where a grand space need not encourage melodramatic gestures. In some way, the Cluny tapestries must have also comforted him, for he says, "l'étude de la décoration picturale rarement possible du reste bien plus bornée mais qui devrait me donner la

tranquillité d'un ouvrier—repenser souvent aux tapisseries de Cluny...."61 32

Vuillard's synthesis of influences was dearly unique. He mixed influences from previous artists and traditions, attended to factual information and design concerns, and made perceptive observations into the character of the human figures, translating them into believable and sympathetic people. In all, Vuillard combined these elements to form a visual tour-de-force that can only be imagined; the panels will likely never be assembled together again.

Figure 15 La Vie seigneuriale 33

Endnotes Chapter I

1. Andrew Camduff Ritchie, Edouard Vuillard (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1954), 19-20; Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modem Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 92. Reprinted from G.-Albert Aurier’s "Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin," Mercure de France (Paris, E, 1891), 159-164.

2. Chipp, 93-94. Reprinted from G.-Albert Aurier's "The Symbolist Painters," Révue Encyclopédique (Paris, April, 1892).

3. Ibid.

4. John Russell, Edouard Vuillard: 1868-1940 (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society Ltd.; exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, 11 September-24 October 1971; Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 18 November-2 January 1972; Art Institute of Chicago, 29 January-12 March 1972), 30. The panels were painted in oil for the Desmarais family. Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Russell refer to this volume.

5. Max Kozloff, "Four Short Essays on Vuillard," Artforum (December, 1971), 68. Gloria Groom in'Tainting as Decoration for the Domestic Interior: Edouard Vuillard's Patrons and Projects 1892-1901,"(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1989) includes the Natanson brothers' birth and death dates. Groom kindly permitted me to read her dissertation after I had already completed the draft of my thesis. We both arrived independently at similar conclusions concerning Vuillard's avoidance of specificity regarding location and his interest in social types. We also make similar observations, include comparable source material including nineteenth-century postcards and guidebooks, and discuss coincidentally several of the same paintings in order to make certain points. Where I have borrowed material from Ms. Groom, I have of course, made citations to her work. Citations to Groom refer to her unfinished manuscript. For further information on the formation of La Revue Blanche, see Wildenstein Gallery, New York, La Revue Blanche (exhibition catalogue, 17 November through December, 1983; text by Georges Bernier).

6. The series also included two overdoors which have not survived. According to Jacques Salomon, Vuillard's friend and chronicler, the Natanson's paid Vuillard 800 francs for the commission. See Musée Royaux 34 des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Bonnard, Vuillard, Roussel (exhibition catalogue, 26 September-30 November 1975), 74; also notes from Registrar's files, The Cleveland Museum of Art.

7. Groom, 98. Groom has addressed extensively the topic of Vuillard's patrons. She believes there is some evidence to suggest that Alexandre and Olga may have been models for two of Marcel Proust's characters in Du Côté de chez Swann, with Olga as the demi-mondaine Odette, and Alexandre as the "Jewish dilletante Swann," who like Alexandre, aspired to the highest level of Parisian society. She cites David F. Wakefield, "Proust as an Art Critic," (M.A. report, Courtauld Institute, London, 1968). Groom also notes that Vuillard's patrons did not include people who had a long family tradition of painted wall decorations in the home, but "foreigners", such as the Natansons (lecture, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 24 November 1989).

8. Ibid., for discussion of French traditional wall painting compared to Nabi aesthetics for decoration.

9. Journals, 6 September 1890. Translated by George T.M. Shackelford in Elizabeth Wynne Easton's, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989; exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 18 November 1989-29 January 1990; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 17 February-29 April 1990; The Brooklyn Museum, 18 May-30 July 1990), 18. Unless noted, as here, all citations to Vuillard's journals refer to his orginal unpublished manuscript, Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France, Paris.

10. Elizabeth G. Holt, A Documentary History of Art, vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 521.

11. Vuillard studied art at the Ecole des Gobelins, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and Académie Julian. See Groom, 8 . She cites Patricia Ciaffa's The Portraits of Vuillard (published dissertation, 1985), as a source of Vuillard's exact dates of attendance to these schools. Ciaffa believes Vuillard began attending the Académie Julian in 1885.

12. Easton, 20.

13. Claude Roger-Marx, "Edouard Vuillard, 1867-1940," Gazette des Beaux- Arts (June, 1946), 375. 35 14. Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 176.

15. Easton, 19.

16. For a more comprehensive discussion of Vuillard and Denis' approach to painting, see Easton, 18-20.

17. Russell, 11.

18. Easton, 26-28. For an interesting discussion of the corsetmaking profession in late nineteenth-century Paris, see 26-29.

19. Russell, 10.

20. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 137.

21. Hare, Augustus J. Walks in Paris, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: David McKay, n.d.), 110.

22. John Russell, "Vuillard, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," Art News (March, 1973), 24-25. Later in the article, however, Russell acknowledges that some of Vuillard's work shows more range.

23. Mario Amaya, "Vuillard's Housebroken Muse," Art in America (September-October, 1971), 103.

24. For commentary concerning Vuillard and his interest in the working class, see Belinda Thomson's Vuillard (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 151. She mentions Vuillard's enthusiasm with his friend Léon Blum's achievements in improving labor conditions as leader of the Socialist Popular Front in 1936. Patricia Eckert Boyer in The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, co-published by the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1988) mentions two works by Vuillard with overt anti-authority or pro-worker feeling: Jour de Manifestation, a pastel dated 1890-2, depicting a demonstration violently stopped by policemen knocking down the protesters, including the elderly; and a drawing Metal Workers at the Eiffel Tower, dated 1889-90, which sympathetically portrays skilled craftsmen in front of the symbol of industrial change, the Eiffel Tower, 20. Boyer, too, sees the political side of much Nabis art and activity, 1-81. 36

25. Easton, 29.

26. George L. Mauner, The Nabis: Their History and their Art, 1888-1896 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 134.

27. Ibid. Mauner further notes that Vuillard depicted for the Théâtre Libre in 1890 a similar motif.

28. Ibid.

29. Raymond Rudorff, The Belle Epoque: Paris in the Nineties (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 175-6. La Revue Blanche made its debut in 1889 in Liège, Belgium before its editorial offices were moved to Paris in 1891. The original manifesto for the magazine printed in 1889, in which Alfred Natanson probably had some hand in writing, expressly stated "that the Revue Blanche should remain open to every opinion and every school of thought." See Wildenstein Gallery, New York, 8.

30. Russell, 12. Proust and Vuillard did not know each other at the Lycée Condorcet.

31. Charles Chassé, The Nabis and their Period, translated by Michael Bullock (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), 10. Chassé selects this quote from a school speech delivered by a certain speaker ("Langle") to show that he "has been struck with the insistence with which the speakers have referred to this characteristic of the school."

32. Easton, 8. As Easton points out, these are the same tenets exercised by the Symbolists.

33. Journals, for example, 23 July 1894: "Tranquillité des jours d'été. Pas énervement."

34. Rudorff, 168, 234. Eleven bombs exploded in Paris between March of 1892 and the summer of 1894.

35. For a thorough discussion of socialist theory and the arts, and specifically anarchism, see Eugenia Herbert's The Artist and Social Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 82, passim. Dr. Herbert suggests "anarchism," in its loosest meaning, is another word for "individualism." She says, "Esthetically it [anarchism] led to the rejection of old rules and 37 doctrines and insistence on the sole authority of the creative mind. Socially it had in it the germs of two diverging philosophies, the one antisocial, the other distinctly social. It is this that has caused so much confusion in interpreting the period. On the one hand there was a defiant repudiation of social resposibility,...on the other, the conviction that if anarchism was the ideal for one it was the ideal for many...."

36. Rudorff, 175-6.

37. Ritchie, 96. Lugné-Poë often rehearsed and formulated ideas while Vuillard and Denis were working. According to Lugné-Poë, studio life was intellectually stimulating and often boisterous. Also see Lugné-Poë's description of studio life at 28 rue Pigalle in Russell, 80-85.

38. Wolfgang Storch and Henning Rischbeiter, Art and the Stage in the Twentieth Century (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 16.

39. Ibid. Edvard Munch also designed programs for the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre.

40. Russell, 31.

41. Storch, 18.

42. Ibid. Also Mauner, 151.

43. For further study into Mallarmé and Symbolist theatre, see Paula Gilbert Lewis, The Aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé in Relation to his Public (London: Associated University Presses, 1976) and Haskell Block, Mallarmé and the Symbolist Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963).

44. Salomon, Vuillard (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 60. The conclusion of the sentence reads "...à se maintenir dans cet 'air irrespirable' qui, comme disait Degas, est celui de toute bonne peinture."

45. Claire Frèches-Thory, "Jardins publics de Vuillard," Revue de Louvre 29 no. 4 (1979), 307-312.

46. Ibid., 305-7.

47. Ibid., 307. Frèches-Thory obtained a description of the building's sale, a brief summary which included the measurements of the rooms. The dining 38 room, adjacent room, and the mezzanine room all had dimensions which could have accommodated the series.

48. Groom includes a photocopy of an unpublished photograph in her dissertation of an in situ photograph of l'Interrogatoire which shows a simple wood band surrounding the panel which was fixed "flush" with the wall. Two heavy curtains flank the panel which, according to Groom, hung approximately three to four feet off the ground. The photo, unfortunately, does not provide a sufficient context to indicate which room featured the panels within the Natanson household. Presumably, the panels were not "showcased" in the room since a small table arranged with photographs and a vase was placed directly in front of the panel, partially obstructing the view. Based on Easton's discussion of the three dominant interiors of late nineteenth century Parisian apartments—the historicizing, the art nouveau interior and the "eclectic interior"— it would seem, judging by the casual, cluttered table in the photo that the Natanson interior belonged to the latter category. For a discussion of nineteenth-century interiors, see Groom's dissertation and Easton, 68-72. For a general discussion see Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Furnishing (New York: George Braziller, 1964) and George Savage, A Concise History of Interior Decoration (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966). Also, Groom notes only one in situ photograph exists in the Antoine Salomon Archives, Paris. It is tempting to think this panel was selected for photography because it represents Olga and one of her daughters.

49. Frèches-Thory, 308. Groom states the panels were "flush" with the wall, and it is unclear whether she intends to imply they were inserted or next to the wall. The documentary photograph, presumably of the Natanson home on the Bois de Boulogne, does not appear to show inserted panels (supra, n. 48). The information regarding placement and dimensions derives from Frèches-Thory. Information regarding Premiers pas is scarce. The panel disappeared after World War II and has been listed as a spoil of war. See Frèches-Thory, 312, n.15.

50. Roger-Marx, Vuillard et son temps (Paris: Editions Arts et métiers graphiques, 1945), 123.

51. Groom believes the shadows may imply the presence of the viewer, 113. I disagree because the shadow patterns do not resemble the human form but rather clouds. 39 52. Bernard Dunstan, "The Distemper Technique of Edouard Vuillard," American Artist (February, 1973), 45.

53. Ibid. Also Salomon, Auprès de Vuillard (Paris: La Palme, 1953), 25-26.

54. Dunstan, 45, 51 for following discussion. Because of the fragility of the paintings, it is unlikely any of die panels will move from their present location.

55. Salomon, Vuillard, 60.

56. Vuillard and his stylistic relationship to Monet and the Impressionists will be discussed in Chapter Three. Although George Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte has been invoked when discussing Jardins publics and there are no doubt striking similarities between the two, I have avoided discussion of Seurat's painting in order to concentrate on the issue of Vuillard's direct sources. However, for an excellent and recent discussion of Seurat's painting, see The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 14, no. 2,1989. The issue is devoted to various interpretations of the painting.

57. Chassé, 22.

58. Roseline Bacou has also observed these similarities between Puvis and Vuillard. See "Décors d'appartements au temps des Nabis," Art de France 1 (1964), 190-205. Lucy Oakley suggests Vuillard tilted the plane dramatically to give the illusion of a child's perspective. Although it is an appealing theory, I would tend to disagree as it is more likely Vuillard was following Puvis' formula for decorative painting. See Oakley, Edouard Vuillard (New York: Medaenas Monograph on the Arts produced with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 11.

59. Storch, 10.

60. Journals, 16 July 1894.

61. Ibid. 40

"Our Paris, the Paris where we were bom, the Paris of 1830 to 1848, is passing away. Its passing is not material but moral. Social life is going through a great evolution, which is beginning. I see women, children, households, families in this café. The interior is passing away. Life turns back to become public."

-Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1:835, Paris, 1912, in T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modem Life 41

Chapter II Social Life is Going Through a Great Evolution

Over time, many art historians have suggested various locations as a source for Vuillard's garden motif. Suggestions range from the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens to the Bois de Boulogne, and even the far-fetched idea of a Normandy beach; several scholars suggest Vuillard fused motifs taken from various public garden locations into nine panels of a "recreated Paris."1 It is tempting to propose that because the title of the commission, Jardins publics, is plural, the site is a composite of many rather than one public park. The commission appears under various titles from scholar to scholar over time, and Vuillard himself adds to the confusion by only referring to them in his journals as the "panneaux d'Al. Natanson."2 One may consider, then, judging from Vuillard's reference to the commission and the varied titles appended to it over time that Vuillard did not title the commission, although the current title is properly descriptive for the following reasons.3 By studying Vuillard's journal entries of the summer months of July through September, 1894, and merging the information gleaned from the journal with the known physical realities of public parks in Paris, and Vuillard's relationship to them, it may finally be concluded that Vuillard was looking at several Parisian parks, some of which can specifically be identified. Belinda Thomson, in her monograph on the artist, states that Vuillard fused motifs taken from the Bois de Boulogne, the Tuileries, and the Square de la Trinité.4 She does not substantiate her statement, but it is easy to guess how she arrived at her conclusion: these were the parks specifically 42

Figure 16 Partial map of Paris showing location of Vuillard's home mentioned in Vuillard's journals during the summer months of 1894, when he was formulating in his mind the subject and desired execution of the commission. Moreover, a fact which Thomson does not mention, is that two of the parks are close to the routes of Vuillard's day-to-day activities. Vuillard, judging from his journals, was a frequent visitor to the Louvre, adjacent to the Tuileries gardens. The route from his home at this time, located at the corner of rue d'Alger and rue Saint-Honoré, near the Place Vendôme, to the Louvre could easily take in the Tuileries Gardens, if he travelled by way of the 43 rue de Rivoli (fig. 16).5 The Square de la Trinité, located in the ninth arrondissement, is only a short walk up to Vuillard's studio on the rue Pigalle (fig. 17).6

Figure 17 Partial map of Paris highlighting Square de la Trinité and rue Pigalle As for the Bois de Boulogne (known simply as the Bois), located on the west end of Paris and accessible by tram, Vuillard mentions it frequently enough throughout his journals to confirm that the Bois was a favorite and often 44

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Figure 18 Map of Paris highlighting the Bois de Boulogne, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Square de la Trinité, Jardin du Luxembourg, Bois de Vincennes and Parc Monceau traveled promenade for him (fig. 18). The Alexandre Natanson family, further, had more recently moved to the Avenue Bois de Boulogne (now avenue Foch), the elegant avenue leading to the park, making it likely Vuillard would have included the Bois in his conception if only for its 45

Figures 19, 20 Late nineteenth-century photographs of Tuileries Gardens proximity to the Natanson home. His journal entries during these summer months include several labeled sketches, such as a nanny in the Square de la

Trinité and the acacia trees of the Bois de Boulogne.7 Although eventually altered and modified, these sketches taken from life of the Bois, Trinity Square and Tuileries served as source material for the panels of Jardins publics. In his journals, Vuillard revealed his wish that the motif of the commission be imprecise: "Really for a decoration for an apartment a subject that's objectively too precise could easily become unbearable. One would grow less quickly tired of a textile, of designs that don't have too much literary precision."8 Vuillard achieves this ambiguity or absence of clarity by excluding prominent details of a garden, such as the iron edgings around the grass, 46 statuary, fragments of buildings seen through the trees to the outside world, or even buildings within the park grounds. Benches and chairs remain, and a rustic fence, but all other man-made features have been excluded, so that only the essence of the park with its lush and varied landscape remains. Photographs taken of Parisian parks in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century reveal the extent to which Vuillard has reduced and excluded certain features of the garden. An airview of the Tuileries taken from the top of a building or even a balloon shows details of orange trees in tubs, statues and fountains while a photograph of one small area of the Bois de Boulogne focuses on a picturesque onion-domed edifice (figs.19, 20, 21).

PARIS - Le Lac du Bo is de Boulogne

Figure 21 Tum-of-the-century postcard of Bois de Boulogne These prominent markers or sites of popular interest were of no concern to Vuillard. Two of Vuillard's studies for the series yield tiny features which at first promise to be references to a specific place (figs. 22, 23). Figure 22, a study 47 for Les Nourrices, shows a brick edifice with quoins while figure 23 shows a small fragment of railing leading down into the garden. Both features, however, are eliminated in the final version.9 Vuillard occupied himself, instead, with evoking the sensation various public parks aroused in him, an awareness of both the restricted, tightly organized and cloistered feeling of the formal gardens and the broad expanse and liberated feeling of the picturesque garden with its winding paths and open spaces.

Figure 22 Sheet of prepatory studies for Jardins publics 48

Figure 23 Studies and notes from Vuillard's journals, July, 1894 The rigid symmetry of the gardens in Les Deux écoliers and Sous les arbres suggests an area of the Tuileries with its repeated rows of regularly spaced and manicured trees. Both the Square de la Trinité and Bois de Boulogne are gardens based on preplanned irregularities and the asymmetry of the picturesque garden style. L’Interrogatoire and Fillettes jouant could have taken place in the Square or the Bois with its winding paths and rounded clumps of trees. And the wide open spaces of the triptych, La Promenade and Les Premiers pas are reminiscent of the free-flowing, meandering spaces of the Bois de Boulogne, such as the areas around the racetracks including the

Moulin de Longchamp, and the Bagatelle.10 The tonal values of the panels correspond to the location from which they are taken. Those panels with locations in open spaces, such as the triptych, have a more blond palette, with muted and muffled colors, as if bleached by the summer sun. Where shade is 49 prominent, in such panels as Les Deux écoliers and Sous les arbres, the palette is brighter and more vivid.11 Vuillard's exclusion of man-made markers makes the appearance of the fence in the triptych and La Promenade troublesome. When Vuillard was so careful to pare down the gardens to the essentials of a formal and seemingly informal arrangement of space, why did he include a rustic fence in the triptych? Vuillard may have intended the fence to function as a compositional device that would visually link the three panels of the triptych together, similar to the purpose served by the uppermost branches of Sous les arbres and Les Deux écoliers. Further, the continuation of the fence in La Promenade links it with the triptych, so that although l'Ombrelle rouge and La Promenade are at right angles to one another, the depiction of space in both is continuous and linear. The fence also serves two functions as a marker; one, to separate foreground and background space, and two, to establish the spacial relationship of the figures in the panels. While the three chatty women of La Conversation are closest to the fence with their backs to it, the figures in Les Nourrices and l'Ombrelle rouge are further away and at right angles to the fence. The old woman with the umbrella and the nurse and children face one another. Unfortunately, the fence cannot be used as a clue to establish definitively the area of the vast, 2100 acre Bois de Boulogne that Vuillard focused on as a broad backdrop for the triptych. Adolphe Alphand, Director of Streets and Parks during the Second Empire, in Les Promenades de Paris includes a detailed description of the Bois de Boulogne down to the dimensions of the iron edgings and the appearance of various gates and fences. Nowhere in his 50

Figure 24 Mid nineteenth-century print of track at Bois drawings, though, does he include the rustic, wooden fence. He mentions briefly a wooden fence in his discussion of the architectural details of the track and grandstands at Longchamp on the west side of the Bois de Boulogne.12 A nineteenth-century print of the track at the Bois confirms the presence of this type of fence at Longchamp (fig. 24). Another illustration in an 1899 publication features a similar fence at the Champ d'Entrainement just north of the track in the Bois (fig. 25). Three late nineteenth century photographs also show a similar type of fence in the nearby area of the Moulin de TAbbaye au Longchamp (figs. 26, 27, 28). But in a picture of the Moulin in an article about the Bois published in 1899, the rustic fence has changed to a buttressed fence (fig. 29). In Manet's racing pictures of earlier dates, the fence is not rustic (fig. 30).13 I suggest, then, that these fences were temporary. Vuillard was likely familiar with these areas of Longchamps, near the tracks and windmill, 51

Figure 25 Champ d’entrainement, Bois de Boulogne, 1899 and was possibly inspired by these particular sites of open fields marked by rickety fences. In fact, it may be that Vuillard preferred this type of temporary fence since it was non-specific by comparison to the ornate grilles common to other parts of the Bois and other gardens in Paris. The rustic, wooden fence in Vuillard's panels is entirely appropriate for the seemingly informal and generic space it occupies. Since the gardens and their occupants are the prominent features of Vuillard's panels, it is important to place the series in the historical and socio¬ cultural context of gardens in Paris. What was the public park to Parisians? In order to answer this question it may be helpful to trace briefly the historical background of the three sites with comments by witnesses and observers of the time. 52

Fleures 26, 27, 28 Late nineteenth-century photographs of area near Moulin de l'Abbaye, Bois de Boulogne 53

Figure 29 Moulin de Longchamp, Bois de Boulogne, 1899

Figure 30 Edouard Manet, The Races at Longchamp, c. 1867 54

The Tuileries began as a site for tile production before its transformation after 1518 into a royal palace.14 The Tuileries and its gardens were royal property (fig. 31).

Figure 31 Plan of the Tuileries Gardens at the time of Le Nôtre During the French Revolution and later nineteenth-century Commune, the Tuileries, literally perceived as a symbol of aristocratic authority, suffered the most damage by dissident forces. The Convention of the French Revolution met at the Tuileries and even converted the gardens from an ornamental display to useful vegetable gardens planted to feed the people.15 The buildings of the Tuileries, the site of artillery storage, were set on fire by Communards and burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt after the Paris Commune of 1871. Although royal property, the Tuileries Gardens were open to the public, but only to those who were "well-dressed," and not "mean persons;"16 or, as an 1855 guidebook suggests, "les hommes et les femmes sont admis à la condition de s'y conformer aux règles de plus strict décorum."17 This same 55 guidewriter insists that the Tuileries did not cater to any specific type in Paris, "On y trouve réunis l'enfance et l'âge mur, le négociant et l’artiste, le militaire et le bureaucrate...."18 With sentinels at the gates barring entrance to "men in blouses, persons with heavy parcels, and dogs," the Tuileries was considered to be an unmenacing place, especially for women and children.19 Georges Fath, writing to a young audience about Paris gardens during the mid nineteenth century notes,"On ne trouve pas un espace...où les enfants puissent s'ébattre avec plus de sécurité" (fig. 32).20

Figure 32 Children playing in the Tuileries, 1869 The Tuileries also functioned as a fashionable rendez-vous where elegant society met routinely, often in specific locations within the garden, such as 56 the popular Terrasse des Feuillants stretching along the rue de Rivoli (fig.

33).21

Figure 33 La Terrasse des Feuillants, c. 1800 The Tuileries was also a site of spectacles. During the Second Empire, people gathered outside the royal residence to hear band concerts and many spectators waited every morning to see the Emperor and Empress take their mid-morning stroll.22 The Tuileries became increasingly less exclusive in its admission policy over time. Victoria Steele attributes this development in part to the revolutionary technological advances in fashion. She says,

That dress marked the dividing line was a long-established French convention going back to the pre-revolutionary period when anyone could enter Versailles, provided they were suitably attired. Now, however, suitable dress was far more easily obtained, and patterns of entertainment increasingly took people out of their homes...into the wide, urban world.23 57

Robert Herbert, too, mentions the important role fashion played in bringing about change in social patterns. Herbert places the Second Empire and the court of Eugénie as the point of origin for this change: In the Second Empire, Eugénie and her court were the principle initiators of fashion partly because the upstart regime needed the aid of ostentatious costume (frequently recalling past royalty) to assert its legitimacy ...Once the court and elegant women had launched a new style, the new money stepped in~'encouraged by the court'—and made imitations. Upwardly mobile citizens then bought these second generation designs as a way of associating themselves with high persons, another of the many ways the middle class was taking the place of the waning aristocracy, whose role was to provide the social patterns one aspired to.24 In the two panels reminiscent of the Tuileries, Les Deux écoliers and Sous les arbres, Vuillard does not show a fashionable rendez-vous or spectacle but the serene playground for children described by Georges Fath. With the possible exception of the shy girl set apart from the other children of Sous les arbres, all figures appear to be from middle to upper class backgrounds. Here, Vuillard conveys individual personalities in his portrayal of the rather flashily dressed and jaunty schoolboys and shy, awkward girl participating in the daily ritual of playing in the park. Unlike the royal origins of the aristocratic and elegant Tuileries, the 2100 acre park on the western outskirts of Paris, now called the Bois de Boulogne, entered history in 1319 as a church site for humble pilgrims from Boulogne- sur-Mer; the name of the pilgrim's home remained (fig. 34).25 Later, the ancient forest became a royal playground hosting three châteaux for royal use, the Château de Madrid for Francois I, the Bagatelle for the Comte d'Artois, 58

and Charles IX's La Muette.26 After the French Revolution, the Bois was inhabited by the homeless of Paris, until Napoleon I brought the land back into government hands.27 Although Napoleon I began the initial pruning, clearing, and planting of the forest, his work was largely undone by the Allies' occupation of the wood in 1815. The Bois de Boulogne, as it now appears, was a part of Napoleon in and Baron Haussmann's grand plan for the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire. Napoleon Ill's plan for rebuilding Paris included tearing down slum areas and narrow streets and replacing them with wide boulevards, and improving the water supply; in short, to transform Paris from a medieval city into a nineteenth-century glittering, modern metropolis. Napoleon in and Haussmann's plan also included the greening of Paris. David Pinkney notes 59 that Napoleon III probably viewed public gardens "as a substitute for improved housing, for he maintained that they would benefit the public health and, by presenting a happy contrast with the crowded slums, gradually effect a revolution in working class morality."28 Haussmann, the orchestra tor of Napoleon Ill’s plans, did not concur that parks would improve labor class morality, but he felt strongly they were important for public health. Napoleon IH's ideas were probably born and nurtured during his London experience when he witnessed the completion of public improvements in the city and heard debates over traffic and health problems.29 The Bois de Boulogne, for Napoleon III, would be a Hyde Park for Parisians, an informal expansive park designed to "relieve the city's vast expanse of stone and pavement...and make easily accessible to all Parisians the broad open space formerly found only in the more distant state forests."30 At a cost of 14,352,000 francs, Napoleon III planted gardens, built bridle and foot paths, carriage roads, lakes, picturesque edifices, filled the Bois with restaurants, benches and chairs.31 The Bois offered the urban dweller innumerable spectacles, 60 including the Cascade of Longchamp, an artificial waterfall so expensive to operate that the falls were released only once a day, at the "popular promenade hour in the afternoon” (fig. 35).32 The government purchased the western end of the park, Longchamp, which was transformed into a racetrack. In fact, proceeds from the races eventually paid for three-quarters of the Bois de Boulogne itself, making the Bois one of the few projects of Haussmannization that was not an astronomical government expense (fig. 36) .33

Figure 36 Placing Bets, Le Champ des courses de Longchamp, 12 June 1870 Although the Bois was open to Parisians except those "en état d'ivresse ou d'une mise inconvenante" or "musiciens ambulants et..mendiants," and attended by Parisians from a variety of classes, the Bois was popularly 61 criticized because its location near the wealthier districts of Paris on the far western end of the dty was felt to be too accommodating for the well-to-do at the expense of the poor, the majority of whom lived in the east end.34 Although public transportation serviced the Bois, and at better fares towards the end of the century, the Bois was still considered too remote for the majority of the working class except on weekends and holidays.35 Also, although the park was public, certain clubs housed within it were private and highly exclusive, much to the dismay of some critics who felt the Jockey Club and the Tir au Pigeon among others were inappropriately elitist for a park designed to be open to the public.36 Napoleon IQ possibly began building the Bois de Vincennes, the large park on the east end of Paris, closer to the working class districts, in order to curb criticism.37 In the Second Empire, the Bois was a fashionable rendez-vous. As nineteenth-century guidebook accounts confirm, the Bois was especially popular at certain times of the day, depending on the time of year. The Bois was "the afternoon haunt of the brilliant Imperial Court; the carriage of the Princess Eugénie with her handsome ladies in waiting was seen there every fine day, and all Paris acquired the habit of coming on foot or in carriages to

see the elegant assembly."38 The morning hours were the fashionable time of day for riding horses, while noon saw the Bois deserted. By three o'clock "it fills up again and the carriages making their way to the Avenue des Acacias

(a.k.a Allée d'impératrice) form a never-ending procession."39 The daily ritual of parkgoing disguised as "exercise" did not go uncriticized by foreign observers. An American guidebook writer commented: "The exercise of the fashionable lady consists in sailing up and down a gravel walk...stopping 62 every five minutes, having been driven to the spot in the first place."40 Going to the Bois de Boulogne was simply the thing to do as witnessed by photographs of the time which show the daily throngs of visitors (figs. 37, 38, 39).

Figures 37, 38 The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1886 63

Figure 39 The Bois de Boulogne, 1886 The Bois with its many restaurants and cafes was also popular in the evening. Jean Lorain, a journalist writing in the late 1880's, wrote to his mother that he "took a fiacre to the Bois de Boulogne to see the people returning from the races. Leaving his carriage at the gate, he walked around the forest and then dined alone at the Porte Maillot 'in a restaurant full of jockeys and bookmakers. Afterwards, I had my coffee at the Pavillion d'Armenonville, in the Bois, for there is gypsy music there'...."41 The Bois offered such varied, seductive pleasures that one observer felt compelled to write:

The Bois de Boulogne is still Paris; the Paris of fêtes and promenades, the Paris of green trees and pleasures, the Paris of duels and amours. In the morning, a duel and breakfast; at two o'clock, a stroll and ennui; in the evening, dinner and intrigue. There are people who live in Paris, have their houses and pay taxes in Paris, whose whole existence is passed in the Bois de Boulogne.42 In the Bois, where there was truly something to please the most jaded pleasure seeker, an American guidebook writer urged tourists to take a walk 64 in the Jardin d'Acclimation on the northwest side of the Bois to watch newlyweds "riding on ostriches and having their photographs done together in slot machines."43 The races at Longchamp, especially the Courses du Grand Prix de Paris marking the end of the social season in June, were not only a fashionable pastime for elegant Parisians but for all classes.44 Steele says that many "ordinary" people made the long walk through the Bois de Boulogne to the racecourse where they crowded around the track while the more affluent drove carriages and had seats in the private tribunes.45

Figure 40 Boating at the Bois de Boulogne, 1869 The two lakes of the Bois were popular spots for children. The first place the children venture in Fath's Le Paris des enfants is the lake where they take a boat ride and feed the ducks (fig. 40).46 The Bois, where nature is "si artistement mondaine," and the promenade the "obligée de high life," offered rustic views of nature, fashionable establishments, contrived spectacles, but also a large space in which to walk or drive freely where every want or need 65 could be satisfied in one place.47 Herbert has articulated on this phenomenon by pointing out: [Napoleon IITs]...policy combined a genuine conviction in the virtue of open space with political expediency: the new green areas were safety valves for urban dissent, improvements whose role in taking the steam out of the opposition equalled that of state sponsored exhibitions, festivals, and laws that favored public entertainment. 'Nature,' that is, man-made gardens, marched hand-in-hand with modem industry.48 Napoleon in and Baron Haussmann created three city parks in the central area of Paris plus numerous squares, including the Square de la Trinité, which opened in 1867 in the 9th arrondissement (figs. 41, 42).49 By 1890, the second part of Napoleon's plan, to create a park or square in each arrondissement and quarter was completed.50 Henard, writing in 1911, singled out the Square de la Trinité for criticism:

Le square..seul refuge ombragé d'un quartier actif et mouvementé, est envahi l'été par une foule enfantine et c'est peut-être le jardin de la capitale le plus manifestement en disproportion avec les besoins et l'importance de la population qui l'environne.51 Criticism was aimed at Napoleon in, whom the observer found guilty of not providing enough green space for the overcrowded sections of the city needing it the most. Although many scholars of urban planning have criticized Napoleon IE and Baron Haussmann's plan for the rebuilding of Paris, the creation of green spaces open to the public can be considered one of their significant accomplishments, while keeping in mind the issue of the exploitative motivations behind it. According to Pinkney, by the time Haussmann retired 66

Figures 41, 42 Nineteenth-century print and photograph of the Square de la Trinité 67 in 1867, he left behind him 4,500 acres of dty parks where only twenty years earlier, there had been but forty-seven. Further, in 1850, there was one acre of public space for every 5,000 people; by 1870, one acre per 390.52 The remaining seven panels which have a physical resemblance to the Square de la Trinité and Bois de Boulogne, show few of the specific park activities described by guidebook writers and commentators. The panels do not show spectacles, racetrack events, the deserted noon hour, fashionable restaurants, the popular lakes, or ostriches for hire at the Jardin d'Acclimation. The public park as a daily ritual in community life becomes the focus of these panels. Vuillard shows that public park attendance, by the late nineteenth century, crossed class lines. He depicts in close proximity elegant well-to-do mothers, working nannies and poor, perhaps orphaned children. In addition to the public park as a place for pleasure-seeking and people-watching, the popularity of the public park grew out of burgeoning moral and social beliefs about health. I have already mentioned the influence of the London experience on urban planning for Napoleon in, and his belief in the parks as a vehicle for improving morality in the lower class concurrently creating a capital of imperial splendor. Prevalent in the commentary and literature of the time is the belief that public parks were important for public health. Adolphe Alphand in his introduction to Les Promenades de Paris states that, Les jardins publics, les voies largues et plantées, où l'air circule librement, sont absolument nécessaires dans l'intérieur des grandes villes, sous le rapport de la salubrité. Plus la science progresse, plus les hommes sont attentifs à réaliser les 68 meilleures conditions hygiéniques, au dedans et aux abords des habitations.53 Health was an important consideration as it was then discovered the occurrence of tuberculosis was connected with the absence of sunshine.54 Another health-related matter was the medical identification of neurasthenia, a condition discovered earlier in mid century but widely known by the late 1880’s-1890s. Neurasthenia, according to the historian Debora Silverman, was a condition believed to be caused by "nervous exhaustion, which atrophied the nerves by an excess of stimulation."55 The urban metropolis as a primary cause of such a condition could be offset or balanced by the peaceful escape the public parks provided. Although Silverman does not discuss the cures of the time for the condition, literature from the period implies that there was a knowledge of the palliative possible effects of the urban park. B. de Saint-Pol Lias, writing in 1899, suggests the Bois is "un lieu de repos, de plaisirs et de santé où Paris vient détendre ses nerfs, calmer sa fièvre, se refraîchir et s'égayer."56 Yriarte, writing in 1893, suggests the park provides la purification de l'air par la plantation de grands arbres, pour le repos des mères...pour offrir enfin un refuge pendant la chaleur et un déclassement aux ouvriers et ouvrières aux rares moments pendant lesquels ils suspendent leur travail.57 While concerns about health motivated people to believe in the importance of public parks and probably contributed to the parks' popularity, other factors should be mentioned. Sylvie Gache-Patin, in the exhibition catalogue A Day in the Country, discusses the popularity of horticulture during the 1800's and the copious literature on the subject.58 Obviously, 69 public interest in gardening may have fostered public park attendance, especially during the blooming season. But more important than the horticulture trend of the time are two considerations which remain to be discussed: parkgoing as a centuries old tradition of the public promenade, and the attitudes it nurtured regarding class consciousness.

Figure 43 Paris, Hôtel Brunoy, after 1774 Mark Girouard, in his discussion of the changing public space in Paris and other cities in Cities and People, quotes a seventeenth-century writer’s observation of the predilection in the French people for spectator ship. According to this account by Martin Lister,"there are no people more fond of coming together, to see or be seen."59 A case could be made that the architectural history and urban planning of Paris which mingled public and private space may have fostered a particularly French tradition of watching. For example, Dora Wiebenson in her discussion of eighteenth century hotels in Paris, notes that the "dividing line between public and private space grew thinner," at this time due in part to the overall desired conception of hotels as 70 a part of a landscape setting.60 The problem this presented to eighteenth- century urban dwellers owning only a small part of land was solved by architects who gave these estates the "illusion of largeness."61 Illusion could be effected by joining private with public property. Near the Champs Elysées "the gardens of these houses faced the park and by the 1770's they were fenced with iron grilles so that the private property might appear to extend unobstructed into the public space" (fig. 43) .62 At the same time the owner’s gardens were expanded by illusion, the hotels and their gardens became a part of the public space, where strollers wandering by could view them through the grille.63 Of course, the eighteenth-century hotels were not the first

Figure 44 Paris, Cours la Reine, c. 1700 71 examples of the mingling of private and public. The Cours la Reine of Catherine de Medici, west of what is now the Tuileries Gardens, was a popular early seventeenth-century rendez-vous, and probably among the early French examples of the fashionable public promenade (fig. 44) & What did the public promenade offer? As Girouard has discussed, the origins of the public promenade were aristocratic. In the eighteenth century, the public promenade offered the perfect setting for establishing political connections and providing a kind of marriage market for "polite society."65 The public promenade at this time was also a place to meet, hear the latest news, meet lovers, show off, a place in which society could establish its sense of identity. Some people paraded with total confidence that they belonged, others to find out if they belonged or not. On-the-make outsiders who were not acceptable were soon discouraged or frozen off by the direct cut or the cold half-bow.66 Participation in the public promenade, socially mandated in order to affirm one's social position, existed also in the late nineteenth century. Steele notes from an article in La Vie Parisienne, the popular but racy magazine, that "the elegant woman thought it was boring to take a carriage ride in the Bois, but she went because it was the fashion."67 In the nineteenth century, when the opportunities for public promenading were ever-expanding, other attitudes appeared in literature which acknowledged the perceived importance of increasing amounts of green space for the public at-large. An 1855 guidebook considers equality in public park attendance as a source of pride: 72

il est facile d'y reconnaître autant de nuances tranchées qu'il y a de classes différentes dans cette immense dté qui se vante, non sans quelque raison, d'être la ville de l'égalité par excellence. Les catégories établies par l'usage, par les rélations du monde, par l'habitude et l'éducation, s'y heurtent sans mélanger... Des étrangers de tous les pays contemplent avec étonnement cette population Parisienne, dont ils se sont fait depuis leur enfance une idée si attrayante et si bizarre.68 Gourdon, writing in 1854 before the Bois was completed and contemplating the wonderful things he expected to transpire in the park, dreamed that among other things such as familial bliss, the Bois would become a site promoting charity. He constructed a sentimental story where a wealthy duchesse, while taking a carriage ride in the Bois, takes the violets thrust in her hand by a waif in rags. She arranges to meet the child and her mother the next day whereupon among other things she gives them a bed on which to sleep.69 These anecdotes, perhaps written with suspect motives, nonetheless reveal a nineteenth-century awareness of the changing aspects of the public park. The gardens became increasingly less exclusive and mandated as important by the imperial government for the social life and well-being of its citizens. During the second half of the century, the gardens were marked by social diversity. What was once associated with the leisure life of privileged aristocracy was transformed into a national pastime practised by all classes in society. Vuillard's gardens, then, should be seen in the context of this nineteenth-century change in park attendance. Nineteenth-century attitudes and beliefs about the public park are embedded in the fabric of Jardins publics. In it, people of different classes comingle or confront one another, children and adults play leisurely and 73 freely in a protected space, others socialize and exercise, taking advantage of the healthful benefits believed to balance out the harmful side effects of a bustling dty. Vuillard does not focus his panels on any one public park event such as a concert, race, or parade. Instead, it is the park as a daily community pastime that he chooses to reveal in his synthesis of public parks in Paris. 74

Endnotes Chapter II

1. Salomon in Vuillard refers to the Tuileries, 60; Stuart Preston in Edouard Vuillard (New York: Harry Abrams, 1985), mentions the Tuileries or Luxembourg gardens, 62; Amaya mentions a beach in Normandy, 103; Claude Roger-Marx in Vuillard et son temps suggests the Luxembourg, Parc Monceau, Bois de Boulogne, and Tuileries, 121; André Chastel in Vuillard, 1868-1940 (Paris: Librairie Roury, 1946) cites the Tuileries, 53; and Groom suggests the motif is taken from scenes of the Tuileries, Palais Royal, Luxembourg, Parc Monceau, Versailles, and the Bois de Boulogne. With the exception of the Bois de Boulogne and Parc Monceau, she does not substantiate her conclusions. While I agree with her conclusions concerning the Bois, and am further convinced of it with her discovery that Alexandre owned a "petit château" at Longchamps, I disagree with her comments concerning the Parc Monceau. She compares the ornamental iron edging seen in one of Vuillard’s early studies for the series with postcards and illustrations of the park at the time, and thus concludes that because of the similarities in the iron edging Vuillard was looking at the Monceau. This conclusion is hasty since all Parisian parks, to my knowledge, featured this standard, ornamental edging except in certain areas in the Bois where people were able to walk freely upon the grass.

2. Journals, undated page. Elizabeth Easton suggests the date of 1905. See Easton, 143.

3. Presumably the individual panels were not formally titled until the catalogue was written for the sale of Alexandre's collection 16 May 1929 (Frèches-Thory, 312). Groom believes it unlikely Vuillard assisted with preparing titles for the sale catalogue as he was somewhat estranged with the Natanson family by the time of the sale (conversation with Groom, 8 September 1989). Object records from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art contain no records or any information about titles appearing on the back side of the panel. The issue of titling is especially important as it relates to the panel Les Nourrices. The title suggests more than one nursemaid appears in the panel. I see only one, and her costume is more common for a nanny (white apron) than a wetnurse or nursemaid (cape, cap with long ribbon trailing down the back).

4. Thomson, 40. 75 5. Russell, 50; Easton, 66-68; and Groom, 102, have noted the exact location of Vuillard's home on the corner of rue d'Alger and rue Saint-Honoré. Russell also notes the proximity of the Tuileries to Vuillard's home.

6. Vuillard shared a studio with Lugné-Poë, Bonnard and Denis at 28 rue Pigalle in 1890. By the end of 1891, he moved to a private studio two doors down. See Thomson, 32.

7. Journals, 24 July 1894.

8. Ibid., translated by Thomson, 40.

9. Groom wonders if the building in figure 22 might be Alexandre's Georgian holiday château, 104.1 have not yet seen a photograph of his château. I have not seen a similar building in either photographs and illustrations of public parks, nor have I seen one illustrated in Alphand's comprehensive Les Promenades des Paris (infra, n. 12). If this building is proven to be Alexandre's château, however, we would be looking at private and public property, and the thin line between the two in the triptych. This would recall the mingling of private and public property which developed in the eighteenth century (see author, 48-9). The railing for the descent into the park in figure 23 is reminiscent of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg, although neither park includes as much foliage near the descent. At this point, using the building as a clue for an exact location and the descent rail have not proven fruitful. For this reason, I have chosen to concentrate on Vuillard's written account of the gardens he frequented. The Registrar's files in the Cleveland Museum of Art include an unidentified description of Sous les arbres which speculates several figures in the background walk under a pergola, trellises with foliage one associates with the Bois de Boulogne. The linear strip may be a pergola or simply the artist's rendering of abstract foliage.

10. According to Roger-Marx, the landscape in the triptych resembles St. Cloud viewed from the racetrack of the Bois. See Roger-Marx, Vuillard et son temps, 121.

11. Although I believe the alternately blond and vivid palette do indicate location, it should also be kept in mind that Vuillard's color choice and value may have had something to do with the color scheme of the room for which it was designed (of which we know virtually nothing). Paul Signac remarks in his diary in 1898, after seeing an unnamed panel of Vuillard's, on "the clever way in which they [the panels] fit into the decoration of the 76 room. The painter took his key from the dominant color of the furniture and the draperies..." See John Rewald, The John Hay Whitney Collection (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 29 May-5 September, 1983), 81.

12. Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris (Paris: Rothschild, 1867- 1873; reprinted by Princeton Architectural Press, 1984), 99.

13. In Degas racing pictures, the fence is not rustic either. Robert Herbert warns, however, that Degas had a "notorious disdain for faithfulness to landscape," and so, for the purposes of identifying the fence, I have not relied on Degas as a reliable documentary source. See Herbert, Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 162.

14. Hare, 18.

15. Bernard Champigneulle, Paris: architecture, sites et jardins (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 562.

16. Mark Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 178. He cites Samuel Johnson's Works (London: Everyman ed., 1906) I, 577.

17. Guide des promenades (Paris: Paulin et Lechevalier, 1855), 102.

18. Ibid.

19. Steele, 139.

20. Georges Fath, Le Paris des enfants (Paris: Librairie de l'Hachette et de., 1869), 116.

21. Robert Henard, Les jardins et les squares (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1911), 21-22. Henard says this fashionable setting is described in Honoré Balzac's novels.

22. Guide des promenades, 110.

23. Steele, 140.

24. Herbert, 180. For the Impressionists use and interpretation of fashion see 177-193. 77

25. Alice Ivimy, A Woman's Guide to Paris (London: Nisbet & Co., 1909), 141. Ivimy puts the acreage of the Bois at 2250.

26. Ibid., 141-142. All three buildings eventually were transformed into either an exhibition space open to the public or restaurants.

27. Edouard Gourdon, Le Bois de Boulogne: Histoires, Types, Moeurs (Paris: Librairie Charpentier, 1854), 93.

28. David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 94.

29. Ibid., 30-31.

30. Ibid., 94,39.

31. Ibid., 96.

32. Ibid., 96-97.

33. Ibid., 99.

34., Préfecture de la Seine, Direction de travaux de Paris, Recueil de Reglements (Paris: Charles Mourges Frères, 1875).

35. For a discussion of fares and transport see Pinkney, 17,167, and Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878- 1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 76-77, 81.

36. Mary Abbott, A Woman's Paris (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1900), 166; B. de Saint-Pol Lias, "Le Bois de Boulogne," Le Monde Moderne (July, 1899), 60. For a brief history of the Jockey Club, or "Le Jockey," see Herbert's Impressionism, 152-155.

37. Pinkney, 99.

38. Ivimy, 140-141.

39. Ibid.

40. Abbott, 167. 78

41. Rearick, 167.

42. Hare, 222. He attributes the quote to Amédée Gratiot.

43. Abbott, 83.

44. B. de Saint-Pol Lias, 56.

45. Steele, 169.

46. Fath, 46-47.

47. Hare, 160. He quotes Balzac's La Curée; and Champigneulle, 66.

48. Herbert, Impressionism, 141.

49. Pinkney, 99.

50. Charles Yriarte, Les Fleurs et les jardins de Paris (Paris: Librairies Imprimeries Réunies, 1893), 154.

51. Henard, 129.

52. Pinkney, 104.

53. Alphand, LIX.

54. Evenson, 267.

55. Debora L. Silverman, "Nature, Nobility, and Neurology: The Ideological Origins of 'Art Nouveau' in France, 1889-1900," 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1983), 158-159. Vuillard often mentions in his journals the state of his nerves, disclosing his concern and awareness of the condition. Incidentally, Groom notes that Roussel was hospitalized in Switzerland in 1906 and 1914 for "nervous exhaustion," presumably a version of neurasthenia. She also notes that one of Vuillard's patrons, Dr. Henri Vaquez, treated neurasthenia (lecture, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 24 November 1989). I am grateful to Gloria Groom for recommending I read Silverman's work for my research.

56. B. de Saint-Pol Lias, 47. 79

57. Yriarte, 196.

58. Sylvie Gache-Patin, in Richard Bretell, S. Schaefer, S. Gache-Patin, F. Heilbrun's, A Day in the Country; Impressionism and the French Landscape (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984; exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 28 June-16 September 1984; Art Institute of Chicago, 23 October 1984-6 January 1985; Galeries Nationales d'Exposition du Grand Palais, Paris, 8 February-22 May, 1985), 207.

59. Girouard, 170. He quotes Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in 1698 (London, 1699), 14.

60. Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 112.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., she cites Perouse de Montclos, Etienne-Louis Boullée, 107, n. I.

63. Ibid., 113.

64. Girouard, 166.

65. Ibid., 181.

66. Ibid., 186.

67. Steele, 171, n. 25.

68. Guides des promenades, 108,110.

69. Gourdon, 126-129. 80

"Quand je veux imaginer par exemple une composition pour les Natanson je ne suis pas penser à d'autre objets qu’à des féminins. Cela est gênant et preuve que je ne suis pas indifferent au sujet."

-Edouard Vuillard, Journals, 27 July 1894 81

Chapter III Je ne suis pas indifferent au sujet

Vuillard's panels of public parks contribute to a long tradition in French art of garden paintings, with or without figures. The rise in the depictions of gardens in the seventeenth century mirrored the vast landscaping programs undertaken by royalty as both a reflection of kingly grandeur and source of public entertainment. Prints and engravings of French gardens during this period served a documentary purpose or appeared as "tableaux de mode," a popular French tradition of documenting the costumes and surroundings of elegant, contemporary French society in prints.1 Israel Silvestre engraved scenes of royal buildings, festivals and gardens at Louis XIV's request and the Fountain of Fame at Versailles of 1682 shows this concern for descriptive documentation (fig. 45).

Figure 45 Israel Silvestre, The Fountain of Fame at Versailles, 1682 In contrast to Silvestre's attention to building and vegetal detail, a seventeenth-century print of women conversing with a man in the Tuileries 82 garden concentrates on the social aspects and sartorial display of the promenade; the "landscape" itself is almost incidental (fig. 46). The garden continued to be a popular subject in French art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ever-expanding into a variety of interpretations.

Figure 46 Women conversing in the Tuileries, 1692 The French garden frequently appeared in eighteenth-century paintings by Rococo artists such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Watteau, the latter artist admired by Vuillard and mentioned in his journals. As Sylvie Gache-Patin points out, these Rococo artists depicted the aristocratic garden while in the nineteenth century "Manet, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Caillebotte, and Monet recorded the bourgeois gardens and public park in their first flowerings."2 Since Vuillard was particularly keen on Watteau, the Rococo artist whose unusual subject matter warranted the formation of a new Academy category 83 in painting named the "fête galante," a brief discussion of his work would help to reveal the qualities of his art admired by Vuillard. Donald Posner has suggested that Watteau's interpretation of the "fête galante" evolved from several sources; one, the "tableaux de mode," two, the Netherlandish genre tradition—which had influenced Watteau in his early years as a painter—, and three, the influence of the theatre, in which Watteau sought to apply to his work "the idea of dramatic improvisation that was fundamental to the commedia dell'arte."3 The "fête galante" itself existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a social activity that concentrated on gathering men and women together for clever conversation and witty reparté, somewhat akin to the legendary medieval gatherings of courtly love.4

Figure 47 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Gathering in a Park, 1717 84

Watteau's Gathering in a Park, which features a feathery landscape setting dotted with elegant figures frolicking and courting one another, may have more to do with Vuillard's conception of figures in a garden than his immediate forebears, Monet and Morisot for example (fig. 47). Vuillard mentions in his journal the "demi lucidité, demi duperie" of Watteau’s paintings and perhaps sees Watteau's paintings partly as representations of people in a contemporary parklike setting, and, partly mysterious reveries with psychological overtones.5 A convincing case could be made that Vuillard's interpretation of Watteau is similar to Posner's thesis that Watteau "shows social constellations composed of single figures, couples, or small groups whose activities and relationships are individualized and intended to convey specific dramatic and psychological meanings."6 For example, Posner sees Gathering in a Park as a playing out of Watteau’s concern for love's evolution in his "fête galante": "love desired, love proposed, and love achieved," as represented by the solitary adolescent looking at lovers across the lake, the enthusiastic lover whose initial advances have been discouraged, and the contented couple strolling on the left. Vuillard too groups his figures in "constellations" which can be read as activities alluding to a grander theme, an idea which will be explored later in the chapter. The bourgeois garden flourished as a theme in nineteenth-century French painting with Manet's Musique aux Tuileries setting the standard (fig. 48). Musique aux Tuileries is one of the most well-known French representations of leisure outdoor life and, like Watteau's Gathering in a Park, focuses on well-to-do figures in a garden. But Manet is more specifically 85

Figure 48 Edouard Manet, Musique aux Tuileries, 1862 urban; his figures are portraits and his setting identified as the Tuileries garden, where "concerts to be heard there twice a week attracted crowds of elegant society."7 Included in his painting are children playing in the central foreground, fashionable seated ladies and gallant top-hatted men crowded together listening to music whose source is not apparent in the scene. Manet, in his scenes of modern life, was clearly influenced by the dramatic and eloquent proclamations of his literary friend Charles Baudelaire who believed "the spectacle of elegant life and the thousands of ephemeral existences floating through the labyrinths of a big city...show that we have but to open our eyes to see our heroism."8 Manet's contemporary scene of a popular 86 public spot partially composed "en plein air" became the "prototype of all

Impressionist and post-impressionist art."9

Figure 49 James Tissot, Without a Dowry, 1883-85 The garden also played a role in Salon art of a more literary approach. James Tissot, also a painter of contemporary life, depicts the gardens with a precise, descriptive approach not unlike the Victorian painters he was surrounded by during his years in England. Sans Dot (or Without a Dowry) 87 from Tissot’s series La Femme à Paris shows a widow and daughter recently bereaved by their husband/father's death, and reading and relaxing in the gardens of Versailles with admiring soldiers looking on (fig. 49).10 Here the gardens with every detail accurately described, functions as a stage for an anecdotal intrigue between bereaved daughter and admiring military men, stock characters in nineteenth-century Salon art introduced to titillate the bourgeois segment of the Salon audience.11

Figure 50 Claude Monet, Tuileries Gardens, 1876 A different interpretation of the gardens was presented by those dissidents of Salon art, the Impressionists. The Impressionist painters, influenced by the Barbizon painters who had in turn admired the English landscape artists, 88

Figure 51 Claude Monet, Femmes au jardin, 1867 were keen observers of nature and her changes throughout the seasons, and their paintings of outdoor scenes reflect this change in focus.12 Monet's Tuileries, a view of the garden taken from an apartment window, strives to capture the poetic nuances of the gardens bathed in sunlight (fig. 50). Although Monet's impression of the gardens taken from life appears straightforward and unaltered by whim, Paul Tucker has noted that Monet carefully excluded the ruins of the Château, which had been burned and destroyed five years earlier during the Commune, perhaps in an effort to avoid making a political statement which might obscure his primary purpose 89 of focusing on presenting the gardens as they appeared to the eye at a certain time of day.13 It is possible that an earlier painting by Monet, Femmes au jardin of 1867, may have influenced Vuillard's conception of the same subject (fig. 51). Salomon comments on Vuillard's interest in Monet at the time he was working on the Natanson commission, and several art historians have invoked Femmes au jardin when speaking of Vuillard's Jardins publics. While Vuillard admired Monet's work, it is not certain Vuillard was familiar with this particular painting. The provenance of the painting yields a few clues. According to Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné, the painting first belonged to Bazille, then Manet, and reverted to Monet in 1876, who left it with Durand-Ruel's from 1882-1887, and then brought it with him to his studio in Giverny. The painting was not acquired by the Luxembourg Museum until 1921.14 If Vuillard did see this painting, or one similar such as Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1865-66, he undoubtedly would have recognized the importance which Monet placed on his background of lush greenery and the decorative, dappled effect of sunlight on leaves, garments, and ground.15 Degas, too, painted the public gardens, and specifically concentrated his attentions, like Manet, on a section of the Bois de Boulogne known as the famous racetrack, Longchamp (fig. 52). Robert Herbert has pointed out: "That these two artists should be interpreters of racing is no surprise. The races were a central preoccupation of upper class Parisian males, among whom they found many of their friends and subjects."16 Degas had two periods in his oeuvre where the racecourse and horse and jockey themes were prominent. In the 1860's, Degas painted the racecourse as "social spectacle," while in the 90

Figure 52 Edgar Degas, Chevaux des courses, devant les tribunes, c. 1866-68 80s, he turned to the intense study of horses and jockeys in movement as a result of his interest in scientific achievements in photography and cinema.17 In Chevaux des courses, devant les tribunes, the crowded spectators of men, women and children are as prominent a part of the motif as the mounted jockeys parading in front of them. Another Impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot, frequented the Bois de Boulogne, a favorite site for her work.18 The motif of women in nature was common; for example, a contemporary critic noted Morisot's 91

grassy fields where some young woman holds a book [or sits] near a child. She juxtaposes the charming artifice of a young woman from Paris with the charm of nature. This is one of the tendencies of this emerging school [of artists], to mix Worth [the haute-couture fashion designer, 1825-1895] with the Good Lord.19 Morisot's The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne while it does not take place on a grassy field or feature ladies on the cutting edge of fashion nonetheless highlights two bourgeois women at leisure in a public park (fig. 53). Herbert notes that boating excursions on the larger lake were typical of the Bois' average middle-class visitor.20 Morisot takes this subject and with astonishing freedom in handling, creates the effects of harsh, shimmering sunlight on the lake and its inhabitants. Vuillard shares with this sampling of nineteenth-century artists, Manet, Tissot, Degas, Monet and Morisot, the notion of gardens as a popular site of

Figure 53 Berthe Morisot, The Lake in the Bois de Boulogne, 1879 92 outdoor, modern life.21 Besides the obvious differences as well as similarities in style and approach, Vuillard differs in that his gardens are populated predominantly by women and children of all social ranks. Gone are the elegant crowds of spectators of the modern scene and in their place an extension of the domestic sphere— mothers, nannies and children. The issue becomes, then, why only a feminine world? Unlike Paris guidebooks which describe the fashionable time of day for going to the park, Vuillard represents the "children's hour," a time of day perhaps in mid morning or afternoon when the gardens are filled with nannies and children. Even if men were present, however, Vuillard probably would have chosen not to paint them. He outlined his attitude toward painting men in his journals:

D'autre part quand mon attention se porte sur les hommes, je vois toujours d'infames chargés, je n'ai qu'un sentiment d'objets ridicules. Jamais devant les femmes où je trouve toujours moyen d'isoler quelques éléments qui satisfont en moi le peinture.22 And further, on the same day, when he mentions his ideas for the Natanson commission:

Quand je veux imaginer par exemple une composition pour les Natanson je ne puis penser à d’autre objets qu'à des féminins. Cela est gênant et prouve que je ne suis pas indifferent au sujet. Ces temps-d, devant les paysages, les arbres, les feuillages, bariollés, dentellés, découpés, j'ai pensé à les réunir. Cela me montre que ce n'est pas la femme même que j'admire où que j'imagine quand je veux composer puisque je trouve le même sentiment en contemplant d'autres objets.23 Vuillard's innermost thoughts reveal his discomfort with focusing so much attention on the subject. Denis' famous dictum taken to heart by all the 93

Nabis— "It is well to remember that a picture—before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some other anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order—" makes Vuillard's attention to the subject during the initial stage of creation problematic for him, but not to the extent he refrained from pursuing his first instinct of pondering it.24 Vuillard associates landscapes, trees, leaves, or things of nature with women. Since both nature and women bring forth similar emotional sensations, he combines the two as a motif for the series. Before analyzing the feelings nature and women evoked in Vuillard, one must pause and discuss nature and women paired together in a wider artistic and cultural context. Vuillard was not unique in his coupling of women and nature. As we will discuss, the theme was common to other Nabi painters, Art Nouveau artists as well as other Salon artists for reasons which have been specified recently by the historian Debora Silverman.25 Silverman, in "Nature, Nobility, and Neurology: Ideological Origins of Art Nouveau 1889 to 1900," convincingly proposes that the craft movement in France was a government mandated effort to aristocratize and promote the craft arts in order to boost the French economy in luxury trades while also promoting feelings of nationalism. Silverman discusses in depth the two cultural institutions which initiated the broad based effort: the Beaux-Arts Ministry and Central Union of the Decorative Arts. She points out that the coalition of prominent politicians and cultural administrators of the Third French Republic pursued a program of craft revival and regeneration in the 1890's, and called their efforts the quest for an art nouveau: for a style in accord with modernity, based on reintegrating art and craft.26 94

Silverman suggests that the model in French history for artisanship was the craftsman of "rococo elegance," and that this body of work which focused on the feminine interior and the woman who occupied that space were models for the new style.27 There were also political as well as historical reasons the woman and her relationship with the interior, and by association "nature," (rococo style mimiced the sinuous lines of plant life) were mandated as appropriate images for the new style. Silverman discusses the issue of the threat of the "Femme Nouvelle," or "New Woman," a topic that was hotly debated in both avant-garde and popular literary publications between 1889-1896.28 A feminist movement was emerging at the time with its first Congress occurring in 1896; lycée degrees earned by women increased from 356 to 3,614 in only six years; the first female doctors and lawyers began practicing at this time; and new divorce laws gave women greater rights.29 To some, these changes were seen as a threat to the family, "the sacralized area of bourgeois identity."30 Further, since the German birthrate was double that of France's by 1891, the issue of the French birthrate was perceived to be important; fewer births meant fewer soldiers.31 Thus, the claims of the 'Femme Nouvelle', a middle class woman seeking independence and education rather than marriage and the home, were thus interjected into a context where the issues of maternity and family were fraught with spedal...national significance.32 The craft organization's "antidote" to the threat posed by the "Femme Nouvelle" was to promote images of women in domestic, feminine roles in an organic setting, as if women doing feminine activities in an artificial world 95 of nature was the "natural" order of things.33 As Silverman points out, the "femme fatale" of the 1880's in France was replaced in the 1890's by an image of woman as a "celebration of female fecundity and decorative intimacy."34 Further, The visual and applied artists who participated directly in the officially-sponsored movement for the reintegration of the arts and crafts...filled the display cases of the newly-reformed Salon [of Decorative Art] of the 1890's with images of maternal bliss and the decorative accoutrements of intimate fecundity. The painters who called themselves the Nabis, for example,... cast-images of graceful and nurturant inferiority into screens and glass panels. These patterned screens and stained glass functioned to domesticate the external world, filtering outer pluralization through the cohesive familial bonds of mothers and children.35 Thematically, Vuillard's representation of a feminine world in Jardins publics was not unusual at all; in fact, the motif was strikingly common in the artistic world of craftsman/artisan and artist, and in fact had already been officially encouraged. The purpose of this digression is not to suggest that Vuillard was aware of or had an interest in the growing alliance between government and artists in promoting luxury craft goods or the ideological origins behind promoting certain themes. Vuillard was not aware that he was balancing "the outer world of pluralization" with comforting scenes of women and children for political purposes, although he might have been attracted to the subject as an unconscious response to the heated debate of the time. The purpose is to show that within his artistic circle, and even outside of it, these themes were "in the air" and thematically speaking, Vuillard was very much of his own time. As an example of this phenomenon, and one heretofore unmentioned, fourteen of sixteen illustrations executed as a 96 special feature, one per month, for La Revue Blanche between July/August 1893 and November 1894 featured images of either women alone, women with children, or women with other women.36 Vuillard's domestic situation should also be considered when speaking of his chosen subject of women. As mentioned in Chapter One, Vuillard was surrounded by women and feminine underpinnings from a young age. Vuillard never married but possibly had several romantic interests.37 He lived with his mother, whom he called his "muse," until her death when Vuillard was sixty-eight. Besides his mother, Vuillard painted two other women with the same frequency, Misia Natanson and Madame Hessel. Although Vuillard seems to have been fascinated, perhaps obsessed, by women, his exact relationship with them in general is not known. When considering the prevalence of shared themes among artists, however, it should also be kept in mind that these themes stemmed from Vuillard's, as well as others, observations of daily life. In other words, the subject of women and children in nature would have been a common site in the daily routine of an artist who wandered outdoors looking for source material. Numerous pictures and postcards from the period attest to Vuillard's allegiance to real life detail down to the hats, baby buggies, and pinafores commonly worn by children, while also showing the popular demand for the subject itself (figs. 54, 55,56). Additionally, it has not been determined to what extent Alexandre influenced Vuillard's subject choice. Groom has suggested that with Alexandre's three young daughters at home, the subject of women and children in the park would have been appropriate.38 Also, Vuillard and other Nabis were fascinated by the Japanese 97

Figures 54, 55 Photograph and postcard of garden-goers ukiyo-e prints which often depicted elegant women doing ordinary, everyday activities. In part, Vuillard's motif of women in a garden could be viewed as his translation of a popular ukiyo-e theme into French terms. In any event, Vuillard did not have to invent the subject, it was already there: in real life, popular domestic and foreign imagery, and the French artistic tradition of the 98

Figure 56 Turn-of-the-century postcard of Tuileries past and present. Why he chose and modified it is of more immediate concern. We have already discussed how Vuillard took his subject from personal observation of gardens and parkgoers which were later synthesized and reworked into a recreated park scene. The presence of women and children in various social ranks from well-to-do mother, employed nanny or nurse, to poor children or even orphans, suggests that Vuillard's Jardins publics may be read as a limited historical testament of social reality: the democratization of public parks where classes comingled and confronted one another in a contrived natural setting.39 By the late nineteenth century, the public gardens were an important aspect of daily community life for all classes and types.40 Vuillard's panels should also be considered in the context of other park and 99 garden scenes of women, for this subject enjoyed currency by Vuillard's fellow Nabi friends, Bonnard, Denis, and Roussel. George Mauner in The Nabis has mentioned various subjects popular with the Nabi painters.41 He believes that although achieving a "state of silence" in painting was the general aspiration of all Nabis painters, a motif was necessary to act as an iconic vehicle between the physical world and feeling or sensation.42 Mauner believes most motifs included the figure and specifically the female over the male as in "Symbolist poetry...[where] the child-woman, pale, slight, withdrawn,...came closest to the spiritual ideal."43 Mauner also points out that the figures are often engaged in some sort of activity, like sewing, which is transformed by the artist into ritualistic acts.44 Or, as Mauner believes, "the effort, as in Vuillard and the others, is to heighten the hieratic quality, thereby spiritualizing the genre."45 Denis' Muses achieves that hieratic quality where women enjoying the pleasures of a garden have become elevated to a decorative extension of nature (fig. 57). The activities of the women, seemingly normal and mundane, have been endowed with the significance of an important community ritual. Bonnard's The Croquet Game uses the game and garden as another version of ritual activity (fig. 58).46 Lest the game be perceived as an irrelevant, bourgeois leisure activity, the nymphlike dancers dressed in white in the upper right comer give the scene an otherworldly, joyous quality, merging with and elevating the everyday into a life-affirming ritual activity. The caricatural Promenade des nourrices, frise des fiacres, a screen painted by Bonnard in 1892-4, also partakes in the mood of ritual activity, adding to it a dimension of playfulness with the inclusion of comic aspects of 100

Figure 57 Maurice Denis, Muses, 1893 everyday life (fig. 59). The delightful genre scene of a nurse taking control of her spirited charges is framed in the background by nurses, all wearing the indentifying costume of a cape and cap with a cascading ribbon down the back, watching the endless line of carriages lining up in front of the Tuileries or Bois de Boulogne. In the same vein of seriousness as Denis, Roussel too, uses the theme of women in a garden. In Les Quatre saisons, four women in a garden play out an analogy for the stages of the life cycle (fig. 60).47 In front of an open landscape, Roussel poses in friezelike form from right to left, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. Spring and Summer, standing tall, look frankly at one another while Fall, beginning to bend, looks at Winter, who instead of 101

Figure 58 Pierre Bonnard, The Croquet Game, 1892 returning the glance looks back to youth, or Spring. Less obvious in intention is Roussel’s study for a mural decoration, Causerie au jardin, which modifies the obviousness of the life cycle by placing the women in a formal garden rather than in an open landscape and adding other peripheral figures to the composition (fig. 61). On the right, a pair of youthful figures are placed next to a pair of "older and more massive" women on the left.48 Like Denis' muses, these elegant women have an otherworldly, goddess-like quality about them which imbues the scene with ritual significance. Both of these paintings were probably known to Vuillard who was Roussel's childhood friend and brother-in-law by 1893. Thus, it is not surprising that Vuillard, too, would experiment with this theme. Two years earlier, in the series of friezelike panels he did for the office/dressing room of Madame Desmarais, 102

Figure 59 Pierre Bonnard, Promenade des nourrices, frise des fiacres, 1894 Vuillard chose the theme of nursemaids or nannies and children in a garden in one panel with seamstresses, gardeners, and badminton players in the others (fig. 62, 63). But it is not until Jardins publics, Vuillard's first vertical panels, that Vuillard put into form his elaborately thought out plan for the life cycle theme.49 Vuillard wrote in his journal that he wished the details of the panels to "se pénétrer de plus en plus de sujet, aboutir à une description littéraire."50 The narrative composition of the panel, then, was intended by the artist. This is an important feature but heretofore unexamined feature of Vuillard's 103

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Figures 60, 61 Ker-Xavier Roussel, Les Quatre saisons, 1892 Causerie au jardin, 1893-94 (lower two images) panels (which he also shares with the work of Watteau): surface anecdotal figurai groups which allude to universal themes. In Jardin publics, Vuillard combines polar relationships between young and old, and between those of different social classes. For example, 104

Figures 62, 63 Vuillard's panels for the Desmarais', 1892 A Game of Shuttlecock, Nursemaids and Children in a Public Garden La Promenade and Les Premiers pas were separated in the Natanson household by a window. If the paintings were not physically separated, the context would change. The lower class girls of La Promenade would be standing directly beside the well-to-do girl watching a baby's first steps. Representatives of social classes comingle. In La Promenade, a bourgeois girl takes hesitating steps towards the poor, disheveled girls and glances toward the adults in the background, perhaps for the approval to play with not only strangers but children from a different social class. The mixing of classes in Vuillard’s work was not a new feature heralded in Jardins publics. For 105 example, Groom, in her discussion of the Desmarais panels, notes that the panel of Nursemaids and Children in a Public Park was paired with the fashionable women and dapper man in A Game of Shuttlecock, and suggests it was unusual to mix thematically in decorative panels working class with bourgeois women of leisure (figs. 62, 63).51 In Jardins publics, Vuillard goes one step farther by integrating rather than segregating social classes in one panel. Vuillard makes these distinctions between classes and personalities clear in the gestures of the human figures and the garments they wear. His expertise in using an economy of means to suggest a multitude of details stemmed in part from the influence Edouard Duranty's "La Nouvelle Peinture" had on Vuillard at a young age, an influence that can be born out by the artist's efforts to reprint the essay later in life.52 In the essay, Duranty lambasts academic art and supports the efforts of the "new" (Impressionists) painters: Farewell to the human body treated like a vase,with an eye for the decorative curve. Farewell to the uniform monotony of bone structure, to the anatomical model beneath the nude. What we hold are the special characteristics of the modern individual-in his clothing, in social situations, at home, or in the street....A back should reveal temperament, age, and social position, a pair of hands should reveal the magistrate or the merchant, and a gesture should reveal an entire range of feelings. Physiognomy will tell us with certainty that one man is dry, orderly, and meticulous, while another is the epitome of carelessness and disorder.53 From the young girl in blue in La Promenade with the simple dress, cropped hair and hunched shoulders to the fashionably dressed mother bending elegantly toward her well got-up daughter, Vuillard's art is a perfect 106 crystallization of Duranty's ideas. While Vuillard was undoubtedly interested in social types from seamstresses to the "old lady alone," a type which Groom has identified and added to the list of popular nineteenth-century characters found in Vuillard's art, his figures are broadened into thinking and feeling people who transcend typecast.54 By positioning these well-developed types within the context of the life cycle, Vuillard combines earlier traditional devices with Symbolist thematic innovations, adding to the complexities of his overall composition. The importance of the triptych is underlined by its reference to the form of religious altar painting. Here, Vuillard establishes a relationship between figures young and old. The solitary old lady with only the company of a dog contrasts with the exuberance of the children and nurses of Les Nourrices. The panel between them includes young to middle aged women, one with a baby.55 In the triptych, Vuillard suggests the stages of life from youth to midlife to old age. Each panel becomes less populated with increasing years and culminates in old age with the representation of solitude. The other panels may be viewed as stages within the cycle: a child's first steps, young boys playing games, the freedom of gameplaying contrasted with the tension of socialization represented by the disciplinary action taken by the mother, and the hesitant steps of a young girl looking towards her mother for approval to play with rough looking strangers. The panels, then, are images of youth’s growing self-awareness into adulthood, and like Watteau's Gathering in a Park, deal with issues of evolution and process. While some of the images are played out in restrictive and protective "walls of foliage" the cycle of the triptych is played out in open fields, where a 107 fence reminds the viewer of the artificial world outside the garden.56 In that sense, it is appropriate that the cycle of life occupies the most open landscape while the other panels are set apart by their location in either a formal landscape or a less spacious setting. The intimate feeling of the Cluny tapestries that inspired Vuillard is reproduced and expanded upon here— intimacy between figures and surroundings.57 And Vuillard's choice of subject matter mimics the relationship between figure and landscape. There is a sense of comfort and ease between figure and environment that is echoed in Vuillard's subject which takes the familiar scene of women, nannies, and children playing in the secure havens of the urban world. Comfort, ease, intimacy, security—these are the sensations the panels evoke. But Vuillard is not sentimental or naive enough to refrain from showing that even the public gardens are not exempt from the social boundaries and rules of the outside world; he reminds the viewer of that in La Promenade and L'Interrogatoire, where a young girl questions the propriety of playing with rougher children and another awaits a mother's reprimand. In Jardins publics, Vuillard's recreated scenes function as a delicately veiled hieratic cycle of life and a document of social realism of the community in late nineteenth-century Paris. The representation of a simple excursion to the garden is transformed into a ritual of philosophic importance where figures become a part of a universalized stage of life, and where their subtle movements make for a human tragi-comedy that addresses social and psychological problems of different classes and ages in Parisian society. 108 Endnotes Chapter III

1. Donald Posner, Antoine Watteau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 145.

2. Sylvie Gache-Patin, A Day in the Country, 207.

3. Posner, 128,145,207.

4. Ibid., 151.

5. Journals, 13 July 1894. While admiring the brothers de Goncourt's mid nineteenth-century analysis of Watteau, Posner challenges the attitude of melancholy they find present in Watteau's work, an attitude which was a result of their view of his work through the lens of Romanticism. Posner believes the "core of Watteau's art is a joyful affirmation of love as the central experience of human existence," 8.

6. Posner,151.

7. Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, Manet, 1832-1883 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983; exhibition catalogue, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 22 April-8 August 1983; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 10 September-27 November 1983), 122. Quoted from Théodore Duret, Histoire d'Edouard Manet et son oeuvre par Théodore Duret, avec un catalogue des peintures et des pastels (Paris, 1902), 18.

8. Ibid., 126, in Charles Baudelaire, "L'Héroisme de la Vie Moderne" (1846).

9. Ibid.

10. Michael Wentworth, James Tissot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 171.

11. For a study of stock types, including military men, see Richard Thompson's "Notes on Drawing and Meaning," and John House's "Reading the Grande Jatte," Art Institute of Chicago. According to John House, stock character types were one of the many devices in Salon art used to "convey their [the paintings'] messages, formulating a set of interrelated structures presented as a tableau of contemporary life, of the 'real world.'" These Salon paintings were designed to be readable through the specific titles given to the painting, the settings, legible character types, all of which were brought together to provide an obvious focus. House concludes: "This legibility was meant to enable the metropolitan, middle-class viewers who 109 attended the Salon exhibitions to label and classify what they saw there....Not only did this involve the identity of types and of a narrative, but also of the relations between classes, always interpreted according to the dominant viewpoint of the middle class," 117.

12. Gache-Patin, A Day in the Country, 211.

13. Ibid., 224. Also see Paul Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 163.

14. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné I, 1840-1881, Peintures (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1974), 150.

15. Herbert, Impressionism, 177. According to Herbert, Femmes au jardin was "apparently never exhibited in his [Monet's] lifetime." Vuillard may have seen Monet's garden paintings via those dealers who represented and exhibited his work such as Durand-Ruel, Georges Petit, or Boussod and Valadon. Vuillard visited Monet at Giverny and may have seen Femmes au jardin there. See John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1973,4th ed.) and The History of Post- Impressionism (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1962, 2nd ed).

16. Herbert, Impressionism, 152.

17. Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Degas (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1988), 73,82.

18. Charles F. Stuckey and William Scott, Berthe Morisot, Impressionist (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1987; exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 6 September-29 November 1987; Kimbell Art Museum, 12 December 1987-21 February 1988; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 14 March-9 May 1988), 16.

19. Ibid., 57. Quoted from Jean Prouvaire, "L'Exposition du boulevard des Capucines," Le Rappel (20 April 1874), 3.

20. Herbert, Impressionism, 151.

21. Ibid. Herbert devotes an entire chapter to the Impressionist's treatment and interpretation of private and public gardens. In this chapter, Herbert suggests that the prevalent themes of leisure life in Impressionist painting were linked with society's demand for more leisure time in order to 110 nurture and sustain "individualism" and allow for "natural instincts." The latter concerns developed in response to the perceived threat of a mechanized society brought about by the rapid social changes from the Industrial Revolution.

22. Journals, 27 July 1894.

23. Ibid.

24. Denis, "Definition of Neotraditionism," published originally in Art et critique (Paris, 23 & 30 August 1890), reprinted in Chipp, 94.

25. Silverman, for the following discussion.

26. Ibid., 13-14.

27. Ibid. See 31-33. Silverman points out that the brothers de Goncourt’s mid nineteenth-century writings on the Rococo period were a prominent source for late nineteenth-century interpretations of the definition of Rococo.

28. Ibid., 125.

29. Ibid., 121,123.

30. Ibid., 121.

31. Ibid., 124.

32. Ibid. In addition to the issue of nationalism, Silverman also suggests that the issue of the "Femme Nouvelle" was bound up with the controversy of the day between Socialists and Republicans. Although the French feminist movement was "explicitly antisocialist" it was promptly perceived to be a part of "the exaggerated fear of the collective menace."

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 141.

35. Ibid.

36. These prints, which were included in issues of La Revue Blanche, were created mostly by Nabis. Odilon Redon (June 1894) was the only artist Ill during this period who did not feature women, singular or plural. Ker- Xavier Roussel induded women but did not feature them in his religious image (April, 1894).

37. For Vuillard’s relationship with Misia Natanson and Madame Jos Hessel, see Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold's touching account in Misia (New York: Knopf, 1980), 68-74.

38. Groom, 105.

39. The series is limited as a source of social reality since Vuillard has deliberately eliminated the presence of male adults. Regardless of the time of day, presumably some men would have been present.

40.1 am excluding the mendicant class, which by law, was excuded from the public park. Whether or not this law was rigidly enforced may be argued. Further exploration of this topic would certainly be rewarding.

41. Mauner, Chapter XII, "The Subjects," 224-270.

42. Ibid., 200.

43. Ibid., 225.

44. Ibid., 234.

45. Ibid., 237.

46. Ibid., 245. Helen Giambruni mentions that Ursula Perucchi-Petri links a poem written by Paul Verlaine with Bonnard's image of wispy forms dancing in a circle. See Giambruni in Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art (exhibition catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 December 1989-4 February 1990; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 25 February-29 April 1990; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 25 May-29 July 1990; texts by multiple authors), 43. She quotes Perucchi-Petri, Die Nabis und Japan:Das Friihwerk von Bonnard, Vuillard und Denis. Studien zur Kunst des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts 37, Munich, 1976.

47. Ibid., 243.

48. Ibid., 244. 112 49. Mauner also suggests the possibility that the life cycle theme may be a feature of Jardins publics. He does not, however, discuss the issue any further. See 246-7.

50. Journals, 10 September 1894.

51. Groom, 58. The pairing of elegant men and women with lower or working class people is fairly common in Nabis art; for example, Bonnard's famous poster La Revue Blanche features the stunning and graceful Misia Natanson next to a street urchin, whose features are broad, exaggerated, and somewhat grotesque.

52. "La Nouvelle Peinture" was written as a disguised defense of Degas' work in the second Impressionist exhibition at Durand-Ruel's in 1876. See Russell, 17. Also, a translated version of the essay appears in The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The New Painting: Impressionism 1874- 1886 (Geneva: Richard Burton SA, Publishers, 1986; exhibition catalogue, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, 17 January-6 April 1986; M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 19 April-6 July 1986.)

53. The New Painting, 43-44.

54. Groom, 109. She cites Ludoville Georges Hamon, "Dames du Luxembourg," Revue illustré (1903), 44. Groom also discusses the prevalence of the child in literature, other Nabi works, and advertising during this period. In regard to the issue of "types," it is interesting to note that Vuillard mentions in his journal, 23 July 1894, at the time he was working on the Natanson commission, that the types created by Degas had been a topic of conversation that day.

55. Groom suggests these women on the bench are nannies or nursemaids. I am not convinced that they are or are not. None wear a white apron over a striped dress, the common uniform of a nanny, or the long cape and beribboned cap of a nursemaid. Groom mentions the possibility that they were not in uniform because it might have been a Sunday or holiday, (conversation with Groom, 8 September 1989).

56.1 borrowed the term "wall of foliage," which is perfectly descriptive, from Ivimy, 134. 113 57. Mauner also finds this intimacy in Vuillard's garden scenes: "all is a fusion of details into a sensation of involvement of great intimacy, either between figures themselves or figures and surroundings," 245. 114

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