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Vuillard, Nabis Aesthetics, and the Feminine Interior

(written May 16, 2010; revised Dec 2010; a few notes added on Feb 2011)

Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College New London, CT 06320 [email protected]

For Mark Haxthausen and Laura Hendrickson, fellow-Wagnerians

Introduction After a brief introduction to the art of the Nabis (1888-1900), this four-part essay examines the Nabis interior as an artistic subject and an aesthetic mode at a time when European art had abandoned Realism, Impressionism, and Academic art in favor of a new abstraction geared toward spiritual or emotional inwardness. No artist did more to develop this interior mode in the 1890s than Vuillard. The discussion of aesthetic abstraction as interiority leads us into the late nineteenth-century idea of music as the highest model for an inner-directed painting and literature and into the musical aesthetics of Vuillard and Denis. My discussion then genders the Nabis interior by discussing the nineteenth-century idea of the home as a moral and spiritual sanctuary from the modern world. In the late nineteenth century, four related movements - the British and American Aesthetic movement, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, and the Nabis – all redefined the domestic interior as a aesthetic space while granting women supreme authority in the decorative arts. Finally, I take up the potential narcissism of an interior aesthetic turned in on its own exquisite beauty at a time when Narcissus imaged the autonomy of modern art. I attempt to distinguish between different kinds of inward aestheticism from the misanthropic and misogynistic (Huysmans) to the mode practiced by Vuillard which attended closely to an ordinary middle class life.

I. A Brief Introduction to the Nabis 1

Les Nabis was a small group of modernist painters and writers who began meeting at the studio of the Académie Julian where most of the artists had trained in the late 1880s. These included Denis, Bonnard, Ranson, and Vuillard (1868-1940). Borrowing the Hebrew word for prophet (nabi), the group saw themselves as a secret society aimed at revitalizing modern art by moving away from the empirical foundation of Impressionist aesthetics while continuing the blended, painterly brushwork of later 1880s Impressionism. Eager to transform modern life from the inside out by integrating modern art more fully into private life, the Nabis worked in a wide variety of media including painting, posters, prints, book illustration, textiles, furniture, stained glass, and the decorative arts in general. In this they shared much in common with the mid- nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, the Aesthetic movement of the later nineteenth century, and Art Nouveau (1885-1910). The Nabis also shared the new taste for decorative surfaces found in Japanese prints and taken up in so much modern art of the 1890s.

The Nabis Remake Themselves After 1900

In many ways, Vuillard and Bonnard extended later Impressionist aesthetics into a new, self- contained world of exquisite aestheticism seen in muted color harmonies, flat, decorative compositions, and stilled domestic interiors. As with every modern movement, the heyday of the Nabis was brief, lasting about thirteen years (1889-1902). With the rise of Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism after 1905, the Nabis looked increasingly conservative and were spurned by the younger generation. In response to these new developments, the five most important Nabis artists - Denis, Vuillard, Bonnard, Ranson, and Roussel – all borrowed from the Fauvism of Matisse in developing a more sensual, late Nabis style featuring rich color, and in the case of Denis, Bonnard, and Roussel, pastoral landscapes and beautiful women (clothed in Denis, naked in Bonnard). Vuillard and Bonnard also borrowed a new geometric compositional structuring from later Fauvism (and, ultimately, from Cubism) which Matisse had already integrated into his Fauve style in 1911. With a strong element of eroticism seen in his Nabis aesthetic from the start, Bonnard evolved more successfully into a late Nabis style. But for the neo-Catholic, Denis, and the “intimist”, Vuillard, the move to sensual color and subject matter eroded what was most distinctive about their art and left them with a more slick, “outward” decorative quality. In the case of Denis, his art lost its neo-Catholic spirituality while Vuillard abandoned the introspective and subdued color harmonies, psychological nuance, and domestic interiority which had given his art its unique poetry in the 1890s.

“United in a frail communion”: Interiority in Nabis and Symbolism: Subject, Style, Function

In its heyday in the 1890s, the art of the Nabis showed a decided preference for the upper middle class domestic interior. In this, we can see a retreat from the modern urban and suburban subjects favored by the Impressionists but abandoned by the next generation of artists working in the 1890s – the Symbolists and Post-Impressionists (Gauguin, Van Gogh, Redon, Hodler, Cezanne). Even the most important Impressionist, Monet, turned away from modern life after 1890 when he retreated to his Japanese garden and water-lily pond. And in the art of Puvis de Chavannes, we can see how “academic” art could transform the public sphere of reason, morality, and institutional allegory with a new, dreamy interiority at odds with the rational, moral world of traditional history painting. Despite their function as grand, public murals tied to public institutions (libraries, universities, national memorials), Puvis’s large frescoes display the growing subjectivity which marks so much later nineteenth-century art and literature. 2

At a time when the Symbolists and Nabis were turning away from outer reality in favor of a “higher” poetic world of the imagination, dreams, and spiritual subjects, some artists like Redon dispensed with all familiar settings in favor of a purely imaginary dream world where anything could appear simultaneously and any elements could be combined. For other Symbolists and especially Nabis artists, the domestic interior offered the perfect metaphor for the new world of modern artistic interiority. As Bonnard put it, his “intimism” sought “to draw emotion from the most modest acts of life” 3 such as meals, piano recitals, reading, dressing, sleeping, mothers and children, and gardens (the interior landscape). The interiority of Nabis art also encompassed the function of the paintings which were used to decorate the very homes they depicted. In that sense, Nabis subject, style, and purpose all coalesced around a new interiority.

Symbolist Interiority: From Allegory to Everyday Life

One end of the spectrum of Symbolist and Nabis domestic interiors can be defined with a painting executed in 1891 by the Belgian Symbolist, Knopff: I Close the Door of My Room on Myself. It depicts a young woman with long red hair lost in a private reverie, staring out wide eyed past the viewer. She sits in a spatially fragmented, ambiguously rendered interior decorated with painted panels, flowers, and an androgynous bust of Mercury, the god of liberal arts, celestial travel, and divine messages. Here Knopff subordinated the domestic interior to the mysterious and irrational allegorizing used by many Symbolists.

The other end of the spectrum is well represented in the 1890s art of Vuillard who, alone among Nabis artists, made the domestic interior into his primary subject. Like other members of the Nabis, Vuillard avoided the esoteric symbolism and obtuse “allegorizing” seen in Knopff, Denis, Ranson and other Nabis and Symbolists in favor of a more plausible naturalism. Whereas the Symbolists often explored an interiority of hidden mysteries, riddles, paradoxes, and sacred wisdom, Vuillard explored a more poetic interiority, geared to mundane domestic settings but transfigured by a hyper-subtle aestheticism of “feminine” refinement, lyrical feeling, musical- poetic color, and the theme of music itself, now hailed as the art form to which all the other arts aspired. Parallels might be found in the lush and emotionally saturated interiority of Proust with its hyper-aesthetic pleasure or in the Wagnerian musical reveries of Debussy and Ravel who Vuillard knew through his most important patron, Misia Natanson. Ravel dedicated both his La cygne and La Valse to Misia.

II. “Most universal . . . yet most elusive”: Musical Abstraction and Feeling in Nabis Aesthetics

The musical analogy is especially important to Nabis aesthetics and above all to the domestic interiors of Bonnard, Denis, and Vuillard from the 1890s. 4 At that time, much musical discourse in France centered on Wagner whose operas were domesticated and played everywhere on the piano. 5 One of these domestic venues was the salon of Vuillard’s patron, Misia Natanson, where Debussy, Ravel, and other composers played regularly and where Misia took up the keyboard as a gifted pianist. 6 More broadly, Wagner’s aesthetic with its transcendent world of oceanic feeling, amorous passion, redeeming love, spiritual longing, timeless myth, and notions of art as a new religion seemed to 1890s French writers, artists, and composers the most powerful musical expression of a Symbolist aesthetic. So central was Wagner to Symbolist poetry, art, and music that French Symbolists create a new journal – the Revue wagnérienne – devoted to Symbolist interpretations of Wagner and to elaborating the Wagnerism sweeping European society between 1880 and 1910. (See my essays on Monet’s Water Lilies and Van Gogh’s Starry Night for more on Wagnerian aesthetics.)

Although Vuillard’s patron, Misia Natanson, much preferred Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner, she became a second-hand Wagnerian through the work of her friend Debussy, especially Pelléas et Mélisande, which translated Wagner’s heroic and theatrical music into an intimist French aesthetic. 7

Beyond the influence of Wagner, European writers and artists since Romanticism had looked to music as a universal language of feeling and spirituality beyond the rationality and specificity of both words and images. 8 As George Sand put it in her novel, Consuelo (1842),

“No other art can so sublimely arouse human sentiments in the innermost heart of man. No other art can paint to the eyes of the soul the splendors of nature, the delights of contemplation, the character of nations, the tumult of their passions, and the languor of their sufferings as music can.” 9

Although Baudelaire was the central figure for French Symbolist musical aesthetics, the most influential writer on this topic in the English-speaking world, Walter Pater, takes us even closer to Vuillard’s musical painting. (Pater is also crucial to an understanding of musical themes and aesthetics in the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements.) Speaking of Leonardo’s fusion of Bacchus and John the Baptist, Pater noted,

“We recognise one of those symbolical inventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of a train of sentiment as subtle and vague as a piece of music.” 10

In his essay on Winckelmann (1867), he added,

“Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought and feeling, incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an external form that which is most inward in humour, passion, sentiment. ... Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the eye--music, by its subtle range of tones--can refine most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unravelling its finest threads.” 11

Pater’s most extended discussion famously claimed that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music where form unites completely with subject matter in an aesthetic of interiority, complexity, subtlety, and abstraction.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form . . . yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling; that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter:--this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. . . . Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the "imaginative reason . . . It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. . . . Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true type or measure of perfected art.” 12

To approach this perfect, musical fusion of form and subject, Pater argued that painting needed to select non-narrative subjects “without an articulated story” which were inherently “musical” such as reading, listening, intimate conversation, and sitting in a watery landscape, what Pater called the

“music or music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening--listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies.” 13

Pater’s insights shed light on the musical qualities of Nabis aesthetics and subject matter, both geared to quiet, intimate moments experienced in the inner, musical sanctuary of the home. Gauguin’s comments on musical aesthetics also shed light on Vuillard, Bonnard, and Denis, not so much as a source but as a contemporary expression of widely circulating ideas.

“Think also of the musical role color will henceforth play in modern painting. Color, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal, yet at the same time most elusive, in nature: its inner force.” 14

With so many musicians, singers, and composers in the Nabis group or married to its members, Vuillard was not the only Nabis artist interested in musical aesthetics. Although more given to outward sensuality, Bonnard produced at least one image of Nabis musical interiority in his lithograph, Rêverie (1893). Decorating a piano piece of the same title written by his brother-in-law, Claude Terrasse and published in a suite of 15 piano pieces entitled, Petites scenes familières, Bonnard’s Rêverie depicts a young woman sitting with her chin resting on her hand as she listened raptly to the printed music surrounding her on the same page. 15 Her hair dissolves into an enveloping cloud of black marks whose flowing confusion plays off against the ordered musical notes and suggests a melancholy dreaminess and watery dissolution. The visual and spiritual effect is not so different from the feeling described by the Belgian Symbolist critic, Téodor de Wyzewa, in his essay, “Notes on Wagnerian Painting” (La Revue Wagnérienne, 1886).

“Art must consciously recreate, by means of signs, the total life of the universe, that is to say, the soul in which the varied drama we call universe is played. . . . In the beginning, our soul experiences sensations . . . At a later stage … the sensations become thoughts . . . Finally, beneath the level of thoughts an even more refined mode comes into being: the sensations become enmeshed in dense breath; and there arises in the soul something akin to an immense flow, whose waves lose themselves in confusion. The sensations and thoughts thin out, multiply themselves so that they become imprecise in the overall flow. This is the stage of emotions, passionate anxiety and feverish joy – supreme and rare states of the spirit; they are still a confused vortex of colors, sonorities, and ideas: and one is dazzled by this vertigo.” 16

One also thinks of Baudelaire’s response to the opening overture of Wagner’s Lohengrin, described in his influential 1861 essay which began the Symbolist craze for Wagner.

May I, in my turn, relate, express in words, what my imagination inevitably conjured up from the same piece of music, when I heard it for the first time, with my eyes closed, feeling as though transported from the earth. . . . I remember the impression made upon me from the opening bars, a happy impression akin to the one that all imaginative men have known, in dreams, while asleep. I felt freed from the constraint of weight, and recaptured the memory of the rare joy that dwells in high places . . . I evoked the delectable state of a man possessed by a profound reverie in total solitude, but a solitude with vast horizons and bathed in a diffuse light . . . Soon I became aware of a heightened brightness, of a light growing in intensity. . . Then I achieved a full apprehension of a soul floating in light, of an ecstasy compounded of joy and insight, hovering above and far removed from the natural world. 17

To be sure, Bonnard’s Rêverie offers a quieter, domestic version of the high-keyed, oceanic feeling aroused in Wagner’s overture. Yet Terrasse’s piano music, and that of Debussy and the young Ravel, owed much to Wagner even as they translated his emotionally dramatic music into something distinctly French and intimist. In 1890, Debussy had already composed a solo piano piece entitled Rêverie, taking a title which became a core theme in Symbolist poetry and art. 18 Between 1860 and 1915, hundreds of Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist, Nabis, and Art Nouveau works appeared with titles like Reverie, Meditation, Contemplation, Evocation, Reflection, Devotion, Dreaming, Secret, Silence, Memories, Closed Eyes, Vision, and Melancholy.

Bonnard’s design for the cover to Terrasse’s Suite pour piano (1893-5) went even further in translating piano music into “swelling waves of decorative sound” emanating from a female pianist and spreading out onto the wallpaper and continuing outside the scene onto a large decorative margin organized as a series of oceanic ripples based on the G-clef. 19 The spreading sound moves seamlessly from the note-like marks spreading out from the piano within the scene to the more abstract world of two-dimensional ornament in the margin.

Denis’s color lithograph, Our Souls in Slow Movements (Nos ames en les gestes lents) offered another successful translation of musical experience into artistic form. Even more than Bonnard’s Rêverie, Denis’ lithograph helps us understand the musical qualities of Vuillard’s interiors of the 1890s. The print also illuminates Denis’s many interiors from the same period as well as his strong interest in music and musical aesthetics. From an album of captioned lithographs entitled Amour (1899) dedicated to his new wife, Our Souls in Slow Movements depicts Marthe Denis leaning on a piano and listening as her sister, Eva Meurier plays an adagio. Both women were talented pianist and singers.

Even more than in Denis’s painted portrait, Two Sisters under a Lamp (1891),20 the sisters in the print are united in a spiritual communion as much musical as emotional. Here Vuillard played on contemporary ideas fusing the supposedly feminine domestic world with a “feminine” interiority and emotional life. At a time when music, poetry, and art were increasingly grounded in feeling, the feminine interior realm encompassed the aesthetic as well. Thus one English writer on music noted,

“The emotional force in women is usually stronger, and always more delicate, than in men. Their constitutions are like those fine violins which vibrate to the slightest touch. Women are the great listeners, not only to eloquence, but also to music.” 21

The pianist looks down at the score with half-closed eyes while Marthe closes her eyes and bows her head in prayer-like reverence. As in other works from the 1890s, Denis used the Quattrocento profile much favored for its archaic, inward, and intimate qualities by the Pre- Raphaelites and Symbolists, especially Redon. Redon also provided the motif of the closed eyes which Denis used frequently in his images of women in the 1890s including another image of Marthe from the album, Amour. Captioned Les Attitudes sont facile et chaste, this lithograph depicts Marthe holding a rose in a landscape with another image of her picking flowers in the distance.

In Our Souls in Slow Movements, Marthe extends her hand toward her sister and offers a single red rose, emblematic of love more generally and of their shared love of music and musical feeling in particular. To clarify the flower’s musical significance, Denis placed the rose directly above the score as if growing from the music. At the same time, he covered the piano with a floral fabric whose delicate arabesques echo the curved patterns of the rose and the printed notes. Another sprig of roses enters decoratively at the upper right, recalling the ornamental blossoms at the borders of the Japanese prints prized by Nabis artists 22 while extending the musical theme of pairs united in aesthetic and spiritual kinship.

Since Romanticism, artists had often taken up the theme of spiritual connection between two figures, most notably in the many “kindred spirit” landscapes of Friedrich and his imitators. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the paired figures usually communed silently before a shared experience of an intimate and evocative nature, usually experienced at sunset or moon light. While landscapes with kindred spirits were produced throughout the nineteenth century, the later Alone among the major Nabis artists, Denis extended the “kindred spirit” landscapes of Romanticism with numerous landscapes featuring pairs of inward women bonding silently. He also domesticated this imagery with many interiors where two figures, invariably female, unite in a deep communion beyond words. 23 Indeed, the album, Amour, includes three more examples of spiritual kinship including a close-up of a mother in profile kissing her daughter (This was a Religious Mystery. 24 Although Vuillard’s principal patron, Misia Natanson, was not the first to describe the power of music to bind two listeners, her account of playing Beethoven and Schubert for her close friend, Mallarmé, goes to the heart of Denis’ Our Souls in Slow Movements and to the psychological and musical qualities of Denis and Vuillard’s interiors from the 1890s.

In return for his fairy tales, I would play for him. Never have I known such a perfect listener. Nobody ever listened as he did. He alone could give me the feeling of direct contact when I played a piece that I loved passionately. Our mutual devotion was to Beethoven and Schubert. Often he would light his pipe and sink into a deep silence. Was he in these moments joined in spirit to his “Poor beloved” [referring to Mallarmé’s poem which she quoted at length] . . . The realization that I had such a kind listener added a sensitivity to my playing which I knew was largely due to the poet. While the musical phrases were born, began to breathe, took shape, grew steadier in the silence, the singular quality which emanate from his presence united us in a frail communion, in which I felt the rhythm of his thoughts communicate itself to my hand.

“Et dans le soir, tu m’es en riant apparue Et j’ai cru voir la fée au chapeau de clarté Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d’enfant gate Passait, laissant toujours de des mains mal fermées Neiger de blancs bouquets d’étoiles parfumées

[And at night you appeared to me with laughter. And it seemed that it was the fairy with the cap of knowledge who used to float through the dreams of a pampered child, dropping white bunches of aromatic stars like flakes of snow from her unclasped hands.] 25

The musicality of Denis’s image was as much iconographic as stylistic. Thus the inner quietude secured by closed eyes and the stilling of spatial and compositional movement through the use of profile and frontal forms created a visual counterpart to the slowed tempo and feeling of the adagio. By eliminating almost all shading while retaining a delicately stippled colorism across the entire composition, Denis imbedded his two sisters into a flat yet atmospheric, inner space corresponding to the adagio and deepening the bonding of the two music lovers. By the same token, the white, all but featureless limbs and faces of the two women heightened their immateriality, transforming them into ethereal, negative spaces hovering in the air like delicate sounds. All bodily form and materiality disappeared, replaced with pale figures whose ghostly forms linked up through the connecting white patch of the musical score. (Denis’s landscapes and religious works of the 1890s often spiritualized women by dressing them in flattened, white robes to make them appear like angels floating through gardens and mysterious forests of the soul.)

By selecting a delicate background of orange-red to go with his roses and red-haired women, Denis further imbedded his two “muses” into an immaterial color field. More importantly, he created a musical sounding board saturated with the delicate and subtle strains of conjugal love. Of all the musical elements attributed to art in the nineteenth century, none was more closely identified with music than color. Keeping in mind Whistler’s musical titles such as Symphony in White and Nocturne in Blue, we can extend our understanding of Denis’s Our Souls in Slow Movements if we see it as an Adagio in Red. There was, after all, a third music lover – Denis himself - present in this interior making it a kind of unspoken trio. The women may play beautifully but the artist remains the composer and performer of this original musical “score”. Although “published” as a lithograph and made available for a larger audience, Our Souls in Slow Movements was made, in part, for an audience of just three, a painter deeply interested in music and a spouse and sister-in-law even more expertly tuned to musical language, listening, and performance. Our Souls refers to Marthe, Eva, and Maurice and to the private, conjugal love expressed in visual terms by the painter for his new wife. 26 Denis certainly understood himself in these terms in commenting on the wedding album, Amour.

“God knows well that I am a singer, that I have played all the cords of my heart; this is my great dream of infinite love, of an immense achievement, of perfect sanctity . . . and of all things white and vague, of beautiful things, a music of great elevation”. 27

III. Gendering the Domestic Interior: The Feminine Home as Civilization

As with earlier genre painters going back to Dutch Baroque art and in line with widely accepted gender stereotypes prevalent among the Nabis artists, Vuillard’s domestic interiors were strikingly feminine. This was the world he personally chose for himself as he lived with his mother until she died in 1928. Vuillard was then sixty two and still a bachelor (though not inexperienced in love thanks to a longstanding affair.) Indeed, Vuillard wrote in his private journal in 1894, “I always see [men as] odious caricatures, and have the feeling they are just ridiculous objects.” 28 More comfortable in a world of female subjects and patrons and in a world of “feminine” textile arts and floral decoration, Vuillard dedicated his domestic interiors to quiet depictions of women sewing, dress-making, reading, playing piano, tending to small children, preparing or serving food, and, on rare occasion, interacting with male friends and family members.

In this refined, orderly, domestic world, we can see a modern expression of the old idea of the home as an arena of “feminine civilization”. First developed by French writers in the late medieval chivalric period, Western culture had long since elaborated the taming, civilizing, redeeming effects of “feminine” poetry, music, manners, and love on the rude and violent male. Fundamental to French Enlightenment culture from Watteau to Rousseau, this tradition suffered a brief setback during the patriarchal years of the French Revolution before it was revived, along with all things medieval, by the Romantics, and still later, by the medievalizing Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, and Nabis. Its most conspicuous proponent among the Nabis group was Denis with his many chivalric themes and images of sanctified, pure women including the Virgin Mary. But the civilizing force of women and all things domestic and feminine was no less important in Vuillard’s interiors of the 1890s however muted its expression. The need to define and preserve a world of sanctified spirit against the assault of a perceived modern materialism and “barbarism” took on new urgency after 1860 and gave impetus to the flood of Pre-Raphaelite, Nabis and Symbolist images of spiritualized women, domestic interiors, and feminine landscapes. Most of these works depicted solitary, dreamy women or pairs of women lost in private musings tied to a higher world of “feminine” feeling. A core theme in the Pre-Raphaelites, it reemerged as a major subject in Symbolist and Nabis art, especially in Redon, Gauguin, Denis, Hodler, and Segantini. At times, these artists painted groups of women but usually in allegorically stylized landscapes far from modern domestic life. (Even Gauguin, who largely abandoned Symbolist solitude for family and communal imagery after 1895, stayed within the exoticizing primitivism of an imaginary Tahitian landscape.) In contrast to these essentially allegorical artists, Vuillard avoided the strong focus on solitary, dreaming figures in favor of familiar domestic settings, activities, and groups of family and friends. So too, his interiors of the 1890s ignored the individual in favor of larger, more impersonal compositions ruled by “decorative” principles. At the same time, his tranquil universe remained saturated with hushed feeling and a muted sensuality, both detached from female bodies and anchored in a subdued yet lush colorism and painterly handling.

Vuillard’s most original accomplishment was the creation of a world of women without male fantasy and voyeurism. With the exception of a few small sketches and pastels from 1889-91,29 he avoided the eroticized interior with female nudes sprawled in bed (or in landscapes) which was repeatedly explored by his Nabis colleagues, Bonnard, Vallotton, and Ranson. In a modern artistic universe which made the female nude and landscape into the two most important subjects, Vuillard was almost unique among male artists in constructing a female world without sexuality or male voyeurism. Until 1902, there was no place for erotic themes in the aesthetic and psychological serenity which he carefully cultivated. Indeed, there was no place for any bodily beauty as Vuillard’s art never descended before 1903 to the kind of description and careful outlining needed to make physical beauty present. And even when he took up the female nude in a few, brief periods of intense activity after 1902, he avoided alluring postures, expressions, and settings. Instead of integrating female nudes into conventional boudoirs or male pastoral fantasies, he confined the nude to the limbo of the unfinished sketch in most cases or to the clearly demarcated setting of the studio making them more academic than erotic. For Vuillard, the nude and the home would never cross paths. 30 The most frequent inhabitants of his feminine interiors were his mother and sister.

At the same time, Vuillard’s interiors retained a striking if whispered sensuality. Rather than completely spurning the disorderly world of eros, Vuillard sublimated desire by transforming it into subtle, aesthetic equivalents. (Here we find a parallel to the sublimation of his own, unrequited love for Misia Natanson glimpsed in his painting, The Nape of Misia’s Neck, and described vividly in Misia’s memoirs.) 31 At the same time, Vuillard did more than tame the world of bodily passion. He also refined and deepened it by developing an emotionally saturated color not found in his Nabis colleague, Bonnard, and by grounding this world of subdued sensuality and longing in quiet, reflective, feminine interiors.

The Feminine Home as Timeless, Peaceful Sanctuary in a Harsh, Modern World From the burgher humanism of the early fifteenth century seen in Alberti’s treatise On the Family to the enlightenment ideals of the later eighteenth century, the family was often seen as a microcosm of the state and church. It was the place where civic, social, and spiritual values were taught to the next generation and the arena where citizens were formed. By the mid 1880s, the traditional harmony between the family and the state gave way to a new period marked by tension, and at times, sharp contrast, as seen in David’s Oath of the Horatii with its sharp oppositions between public and private, state and family. While David’s painting offered a new union between family and state, it was a harsh patriarchal world banishing female sentiment to the sidelines and representing it as a form of weakness dangerous to the state.

As political violence, class tensions, and rapid social, economic, and technological change grew in the nineteenth century, the family was increasingly perceived as a sanctuary from the confusion, harsh reality, and disturbing change of modern urban life. This is particularly clear in Dicken’s Oliver Twist with its orphan struggling to survive in a cold and brutal London before finding safety in a loving family in the unspoiled countryside. The rustic family scenes popularized in the late nineteenth-century prints of Currier and Ives offer another take on this appealing nineteenth-century theme. The family as feminine sanctuary from the harsh, masculine world was described with particular clarity by John Ruskin, then the most influential writer in all England.

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial: — to him, therefore, the failure, the offense, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued, often misled, and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offense. This is the true nature of home — it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before those faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love, — so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea; — so far it vindicates the name, and fulfills the praise, of home. And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.

This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to be — the woman's true place and power? But do you not see that, to fulfill this, she must — as far as one can use such terms of a human creature — be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true changefulness of woman. 32

In France, all the major political parties – monarchists, republicans, and socialists – affirmed this traditional dichotomy between the “feminine” private sphere and the masculine public sphere. 33 Indeed, it was central to the progressive republican left ever since the days of the French Revolution when laws were passed forbidding women from meeting and organizing in the political sphere. Although one branch of the new French feminism called for the rethinking of this traditional dichotomy, many French feminists pursued a more moderate branch of “familial feminism” which left the traditional gender roles largely intact. 34 At the present time, I don’t have the background to say what Vuillard or his patron thought of the new feminism. His art suggests that he shared a mainstream, male indifference or even hostility to most forms of female emancipation. For nowhere in Vuillard’s art do we see the two most characteristic and disturbing features of the New Woman as represented in art and literature – her freedom to move outside the home and her new sexual freedom.

Aestheticizing the Interior: Vuillard’s New Woman as Queen of the Domestic Arts and the Home as Artistic Sanctuary

The conservative handling of gender in Vuillard’s art makes it difficult to see how female authority in domestic arrangements and “arts” took on a new significance in the 1890s at a time when Art Nouveau made the traditional domestic realm of the “feminine” decorative arts into the center of a new, modern art movement. One proponent of Art Nouveau insisted that women had only lost control of the decorative arts in the early nineteenth century and needed to wrest it back for French art to recover its former glory. In his essay, The Decorative Arts and Women (1896), he wrote,

“The decorative arts exert their power in our homes and on our persons. They embellish our residential walls; they impress their mark on our everyday objects; they regulate our attire. In all these, the influence of woman rules, or ought to. While man, even the most sedentary, spends a great deal of time outside the home, the most expansive woman remains much of the time at home. In addition, the arrangement of “home” depends on her; it is what she makes of it, either agreeable or sullen, elegant or vulgar. Living room, dining room, bedroom, the most public and the most private chambers, bear her mark. And interior tells us nothing of the man who inhabits it; it always reveals the character and taste of the women who assembled it. . . . The time has come to press this taste for youth and novelty into the service of the decorative arts . . . Let women take over the direction of the movement; let us ask them for their help, and since they have better and more refined taste, since their instinct for elegance is far more developed than ours, they will soon guide us to tomorrow’s style. Make no mistake about it. They are tired of the past, its crude forms and dark tints. They prefer softer lines and lighter colors. … By enlisting women in this quest . . . we will arrive sooner; without them we will not arrive at all.” 35

Similar sentiments were voiced by George Berger, president of the new Central Union for the Decorative Arts which organized national exhibitions of Art Nouveau art and pushed to organize female artists and patrons in this area.

“The Central Union will try neither to discern if women should dream of the emancipation some wish for them, an emancipation that would enable her to fulfill those functions that thus far have been man’s. . . . What the union knows and wants to be known is that woman has been considered, for as long as she has existed and as naturally as she is woman, mother, and lover with her heart and her soul, the marvelous fairy of manual labor. This woman’s work . . . galvanizes her artistic sentiment, her innate taste for delicate and gracefully treated things. The union has never hesitated to recognize the manual labor of women in the work of the decorative arts . . . The union appealed to society women, to women who knew how to devote their leisure hours to the production of a thousand little tasks. Their seemingly fatal futility disappears beneath an incontestable appearance of elegance, of alluring originality, and of relative beauty.” 36

Women writers on the decorative arts echoed these sentiments, as did a wider array of male art critics. 37 In all this praise of feminine domestic artistry, there was a backhanded slap at female emancipation which modern readers can recognize more easily but which some feminists of the 1890s also understood. Despite numerous tributes to woman as the “genius of the home,” male writers invariably reserved the term “genius” for male writers, composers, and artists while contrasting it sharply with a lesser world of “feminine decoration”. 38 The most compressed expression of this prejudice came in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray where the decadent Lord Henry Wotton tells his young acolyte,

"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals." 39

Despite affirming traditional ideas of the home as women’s proper sphere, Vuillard and the other Nabis artists gave new value and significance to the “feminine” decorative realm by redefining it as the principal mode for modern painting. Without removing its ties to the “feminine,” they redefined it as the highest mode for masculine artistry and genius. And they did this not by contrasting masculine artistic genius with feminine domestic subject matter but by making “feminine” decoration into the subject and aesthetic mode of masculine artistic genius. Or rather, Nabis aesthetics of the 1890s profoundly feminized masculine genius, all but doing away with traditional gender hierarchies in the world of art.

Until 1898 when his sister gave birth to Annette, Vuillard also redefined the feminine domestic sphere by eliminating the maternal imagery seen in his married Nabis colleagues, Denis and Bonnard, and in so many late nineteenth-century images of good mothers nursing or tending to small children. 40 Until 1898, virtually all of his interiors focused on an adult world of music, literature, conversation, art, and reverie. 41 In this way, Vuillard redefined the home more as an aesthetic than a family sanctuary. In doing so, he gave new prestige and power to the women presiding quietly over his highly aestheticized interiors, playing piano, arranging flowers, reading novels, and conversing.

Feminine Textile Work as Nabis Artistry

Vuillard’s imagery of female needlework offers another lens with which to see his world of feminine interiority. Along with child care, female textile work was the most venerable image of female domesticity in Western culture since classical antiquity. Well established in European art since the rise of genre painting in the seventeenth-century, it remained a staple in eighteenth and nineteenth-century genre painting as well. After 1840, female textile work took on new appeal as a nostalgic image set against modern industrialization, urbanization, and female emancipation. This explains its appearance in Realists (Courbet, Millet, Israels), Impressionists (Renoir), Pre- Raphaelites (Rossetti and Waterhouse), and Nabis and Symbolists (Vuillard, Serusier, Redon, Hodler). Yet Vuillard did far more with these images and made many more paintings. In part this reflected his decision to live for most of his life with three expert seamstresses: his grandmother, his mother, and his sister, Marie. His mother and sister raised textile work to a higher form of craftsmanship by supporting themselves as dressmakers for elegant Parisian stores. From Vuillard’s childhood, the women in his life sharpened his eye for decorative, floral patterns and for the colorful textiles which Vuillard made central to his art in the 1890s. (Of course, floral textiles were already central to the British Arts and Crafts movement and remained equally important in both the Aesthetic Movement and Art Nouveau during the 1890s.)

In contrast to Serusier, Redon, and Hodler, Vuillard’s interiors with women sewing developed a unique and characteristic abstraction suppressing all the charming and nostalgic details of sewing and dressmaking. Instead of busy hands, needles and scissors, Vuillard created broad, flat patterns of decorative color, much of it grounded in tablecloths, draperies, and wall-paper which were, in turn, imbedded in Vuillard’s own decorative, flattening brushwork and color. One could see in these works a distinction between feminine textile work and the higher, “masculine” artistry of Vuillard’s own painting. But this turns a blind eye to the way Vuillard’s artistry of the 1890s developed a decidedly feminine decorative style focused on a delicate yet rich surface patterning suffused with an exquisitely subtle colorism. Indeed, Vuillard worked hard to fuse the decorative surfaces of feminine fabrics and flowers with his own brushwork and color obscuring the point where one leaves off and the other starts. Instead of affirming widespread prejudices distinguishing male art from female craft, Vuillard’s art collapsed this hierarchy (in line with the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements) and made a decidedly “feminine” textile and floral artistry into the core of his own, abstracted Nabis aesthetic.

Any attempt to distinguish between Vuillard’s “feminine” subject and his “masculine” artistry also suffers from another problem. Alone among his contemporaries, Vuillard developed a sustained interest in feminine textile work which he developed in forty-five paintings of the 1890s, all but a handful dating from 1890-95. 42 Almost all of these works depicted his mother and sister, Marie. As in Vuillard’s other interiors of the 1890s, his textile scenes displayed a quiet absorption in a world of female domestic work as if the male viewer had been allowed into a secret world. Vuillard made this discreet male attention into the very subject of his painting, The Suitor (1893, Smith College Museum). Also known as Interior with Work-Table, it shows Vuillard’s best friend, the Nabis painter, Kerr Roussel, shyly peering in at Marie who is working on a dress with Mme. Vuillard. 43

Despite their abstraction, the subtlety of Vuillard’s textile scenes mimicked the close attention and visual acuity of textile work itself. The beholder who paused long enough to see Vuillard’s artistry was also invited to ponder the artistry of female textile production. Imbedded within the textile-laden world of Vuillard’s decorative compositions at a time of male anxiety over the “femme nouveau,” feminine sewing and dressmaking was both reactionary and progressive in Vuillard. It was reactionary in the way it enclosed women in a newly gilded cage of domestic artistry. Yet it was progressive in the way it went beyond seventeenth and eighteenth-century bourgeois allegories of chaste and economical housewives to image female creativity, intellect, and consciousness itself. For Vuillard’s artistic absorption contemplated a parallel world of female artisanal creativity and absorption. 44 Here Vuillard made good use of Dutch Baroque genre painters who often showed women from the rear, hunched over their work, or placed them near windows without concern for the world outside. By bringing us as much into the psyches of his mother and sister as into his own reveries, Vuillard’s textile scenes gave new visibility and value to persons, activities, and creative energy all too easily overlooked by men, this at a time when much Symbolist art was grandiose, dramatic, and highly allegorical (Hodler, Van Gogh, Munch). Like Kerr Roussel peeking in on Marie, all of Vuillard’s textile scenes invited male viewers to discover a hidden world which one Nabis painter would make his own.

Given the nostalgic tone in Vuillard’s interiors of the 1890s, it is reasonable to read these scenes of feminine domestic artistry as emblems of a larger domestic tranquility, harmony, order, and continuity. Supporting the public sphere of masculine work was a feminine infrastructure, an army of millions of invisible women handling countless tasks which allowed this division of labor to exist. 45 The gender politics of this social world comes into sharper focus when we learn that Vuillard helped arrange a disastrous marriage between his sister and Kerr Roussel. Well before the marriage, Roussel was known as a womanizer oblivious to the destruction caused by his multiple affairs. The year before his marriage, he fled to Belgium and Holland to escape the bitter fallout from another affair. Blessed with a charm as abundant as his narcissism, he continued to have affairs after his marriage, most notoriously with the sister of the wife of the Nabis artist, Paul Ranson. Germaine had been one of his mistresses since early in 1891 but Roussel continued seeing her after his marriage. In an episode of particular cruelty, he began spending more time with his mistress after Marie gave birth to a still-born child in December, 1894. In July, 1895, Roussel abandoned Marie completely to live with Germaine until the end of the year when the extensive fallout in four families forced him to return to his wife. 46

Although recorded indirectly in only a handful of paintings, the private travails of Vuillard’s sister shed light on all of Vuillard’s domestic interiors from the 1890s and especially those featuring sewing, cooking, cleaning, and other domestic work. At a time when male infidelity was rampant and open, the good wife was expected to remain loyal, patient, forgiving, and steadfastness in her domestic duties. Even after Kerr Roussel deserted his wife for his mistress, Marie continued to bring him meals daily in his studio. This is also how Vuillard painted her after their “reconciliation” in 1896 in a scene where Marie leans faithfully and imploringly against the shoulder of her husband who pointedly turns away. 47 When set against the harsh realities of marriage for French middle class women, Vuillard’s textile scenes take on a certain pathos. Here it helps to borrow an extended metaphor for sewing from the novel of a somewhat later author, Anaïs Nin, who also believed in the strong gender stereotypes inherited from the late nineteenth century.

“When she sewed on buttons for him, she was sewing not only buttons but also sewing together the sparse, disconnected fragments of his ideas, of his inventions, of his unfinished dreams. She was weaving and sewing and mending because he carried in himself no thread of continuity or repair. If he allowed a word to pass that was poisoned like a primitive arrow, he never sought the counter-poison, he never measured its fatal consequences. She was sewing on a button and the broken pieces of his waywardness; sewing a button and his words too loosely strung; sewing their days together to make a tapestry; their words together, their moods together, which he dispersed and tore. As he tore his clothes with his precipitation toward his wishes, his wanderings, his rambles, his peripheral journeys. She was sewing together the little proofs of his devotion out of which to make a garment for her tattered love and faith. He cut into the faith with negligent scissors and she mended and sewed and rewove and patched. He wasted, and threw away, and could not evaluate or preserve, or contain, or keep his treasures. Like his ever torn pockets, everything slipped through and was lost, as he lost gifts, mementos, - all the objects from the past. She sewed his pockets that he might keep some of their days together, hold together the key to the house, to their room, to their bed. She sewed his sleeve so that he could reach out his arm and hold her, when loneliness dissolved her. She sewed the lining so that the warmth would not seep out of their days together, the soft inner skin of their relationship.” 48

The Child as Intimist Subject and the Male Experience of Feminine Love

For three productive years (1898-1901), Vuillard took up the theme of the child to extend and enrich his intimist interiors. Unlike most artists working between 1880 and 1920, Vuillard avoided the allegories of Maternity, breast-feeding, and Marian imagery. Instead, his interiors developed subtler images of caretaking with little Annette quietly watched, fed, or entertained by her mother or grandmother. More often than not, Vuillard generalized the theme of maternal love to all women by replacing the mother with the grandmother – his mother, the woman who also continued to look after him. At the same time, the focus on Annette’s grandmother allowed Vuillard to relive his own memories of childhood through his niece while using his art to express indirectly the love of the child – Vuillard – for the mother. That Vuillard could use women to represent his own love as child and uncle requires us to see how men in the later nineteenth- century understood love as a feminine emotion learned from the women around them and from children as well, especially female children. This was already clear in Denis’ album of prints entitled Amour which expressed his love for his new wife in part through depictions of maternal or sisterly love. One print captioned, This was a Religious Mystery depicted a mother tenderly kissing her daughter. And Our Souls in Slow Movements used the love between Denis’s wife and her sister to image the artist’s own “feminine” love as husband. This also explains the strikingly feminized Christ in Denis’ Biblical painting, Suffer the Little Ones to Come Unto Me (which also served as a portrait of Denis and his family).

Inspired, perhaps, by Denis’s many images of his own children which began in 1895, but more by the arrival of a child – Annette - in his own life, Vuillard began exploring the child as an important new theme to enrich the intimism of his Nabis interiors. It was critical that little Annette was his niece and that she spent much of her time in Vuillard’s residence with his mother and with the artist himself. By inhabiting the artist’s real interior along with the emotional lives of the two women he loved most at this point – his mother and his sister – Annette slipped more easily into Vuillard’s own fatherly affections and into the private world of his painted interiors. She also allowed Vuillard to discover his capacity for maternal love. Here we might borrow Strindberg’s description of his interactions with his two and a half-year old daughter, a passage which takes us even close to Denis’s images of children. Strindberg’s comments come in the chapter titled, Beatrice, from Inferno, written in French and published in Paris in 1897, one year before Vuillard’s niece was born.

“. . . she studied me with an expression on her face that was serious without being severe, probing my soul to its depths . . . when she felt reassured, she allowed me to kiss her and put her tiny arms around my neck. It was like Dr. Faustus’ reawakening to an earthly existence but sweeter and purer. I was never tired of holding the little one in my arms, of feeling her tiny heart beating against mine. When a man loves a child, he becomes a woman. He casts off his masculinity and experiences what Swedenborg calls the sexless love of those who dwell in heaven. This was how I could begin to prepare myself for Heaven.” 49

For three years and some twenty-five paintings, Annette Roussel did more than enrich the “feminine” sentiment in Vuillard’s largely feminine domestic paintings. She also presided over Vuillard’s interiors as a revitalizing source for his intimism as a whole, indeed, as its most important and subtle embodiment in that period. Much the same could be said for the prominent role of children in the 1890s work of Denis and Bonnard. It was no accident that Vuillard lost almost all interest in this subject the same year he turned decisively away from his intimist style - in 1902. It mattered not that his sister had just given birth to a son. The context which had made Annette so important had faded.

Misia Natanson as Queen of Vuillard’s Nabis Interiors Other than his sister and mother, one woman stood out in the intimist interiors of Vuillard, especially in their aestheticized aspect. This was Misia Natanson, his most important patron of the 1890s. She was also one of the most influential cultural arbiters and modernist patrons in late nineteenth century Paris. A piano virtuoso who studied with Fauré, she made her homes into the leading Parisian salon for contemporary art, poetry, music, theater, and criticism. Although her husband was an art critic and editor of the avant-garde arts journal, La Revue Blanche (1891- 1903), it was Misia who attracted many of the luminaries featured in his magazine and who helped shape its content. Along with artists such as Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir, Vallotton, and Lautrec, her coterie also included leading composers (Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Satie, and Stravinsky) and writers (Proust, Mallarmé, Valery, Blum, Mirbeau, Jarry, Gide, and Collette). Educated, intelligent, independent, charming, and ambitious, Misia also displayed an independence in her personal life, scandalizing her family by living along for a year and supporting herself by teaching piano, and, later, by divorcing two husbands and marrying a third at a time when divorce was only recently legalized and still scandalous.

In her independent spirit, talent as a pianist, power as a cultural impresario, and her free- wheeling love life, Misia Natanson had some things in common with the New Woman. She was also a high bohemian following a long-standing family tradition of patronizing artists, musicians, and writers while mingling with aristocrats and business elites. 50 Although she patronized Bonnard, Lautrec, Renoir, and Vallotton, her favorite artist in the 1890s was Vuillard, the poet of the feminine interior. Indeed, Vuillard’s most important subjects in the 1890s, other than his own home, were the Natanson residences, their apartment in Paris with its large central room decorated in William Morris floral wall-paper and Art Nouveau fabrics, and their large country home in Villeneuve. Vuillard did more work for Misia and the extended Natanson family than any other patron in that decade. When Thadée Natanson had to raise money by selling off most of their art collection around 1905, he sold seventeen Vuillards. It was Misia and her husband who commissioned the cycle of five paintings known as Album. 51 Album shows the interior of Misia Natanson’s Paris apartment. Of the seven women in the room, three arrange flowers while three central figures examine an album of prints or drawings. Another panel from the cycle depicts two women doing embroidery, adding to the subject of art as an intimate, small-scale subject of female contemplation and invention. The other three paintings depict three women in conversation (private collection), two woman at a vanity table (private collection), and two women arranging flowers (National Gallery, Washington DC). All five paintings are filled with flower still-lives and floral costume.

In the 1890s, Vuillard painted another dozen interiors for the Natansons and a cycle of four interiors in 1899 for the library of Dr. Henri Vaquez. Although this patron was male, Vuillard’s quartet of interiors were exclusively female and depicted women reading, shelving books, sewing, and playing the piano. Indeed, the rooms in these four paintings were taken from the residences of Misia Natanson and displayed her decorative sensibilities within the larger, decorative aesthetic of Vuillard. The painting titled Le Piano even depicted Misia at the keyboard in her salon.

Vuillard’s feminine interiors of the 1890s offer an ideal test case for his views on gender. On the one hand, the serene and perfect “feminine” domesticity idealized in these works turned away from modern female emancipation as surely as Vuillard’s interiors turned away from the troubling economic, social, and political realities of modern life. Here is helps to remember that the modern family often appeared in modernist art and literature not as a sanctuary from the growing harshness of modern life but as an arena overrun with its problems. In the socialist realism of Kathe Kollwitz and the Symbolist interiors of Munch, Vallotton, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Maeterlinck, the modern interior was fractured with poverty, violence, infidelity, hypocrisy, sickness, death, stifling patriarchy, and female rebellion. The fact that Vuillard was intimately familiar with this art and literature and even designed a poster for Ibsen only underscores his conscious decision to exclude modern social and political change from his domestic world.

On the other hand, Vuillard’s interiors gave new recognition and value to the modern home as a feminine artistic sanctuary, a place of feminine refinement, feeling, beauty, and high culture (music, poetry, painting). If this analysis has merit, we can see how Vuillard’s feminine interiors stripped the New Woman of any social or political threat and relegated her to the new idea of the home as an aesthetic sanctuary. This is particular clear when we note the absence in Vuillard of the New Woman’s willingness to operate outside the home and her supposed sexual independence. Cigarettes, bicycles, bloomers, and all other signs of the New Woman were ignored in Vuillard’s painted world. At the same time, Vuillard’s aesthetic redefined serious and ambitious modernist art in strikingly feminine terms which gave new value to the commonly slighted world of the decorative arts. In Vuillard, the decorative, the feminine, the interior, and the world of subtle emotion all achieved a high level of “masculine” seriousness and professional artistry.

Yet for all this, we cannot miss the way Vuillard’s feminine interiors toned down much of the cultural influence wielded by his greatest female patron. Although Misia Natanson is prominent in a handful of paintings including Woman in a Striped Dress (1896), Woman Seated in a Chair (1896), and Misia at the Piano (1899), she does not dominate any of Vuillard’s compositions. Instead she appears quietly reading, conversing, arranging flowers, or playing the piano for close friends and family. No uninformed viewer looking at these paintings could ever guess her importance in the cultural life of Paris or in any other arena. Even when he showed Misia playing the piano, Vuillard subordinated her to the larger aestheticism of his compositions and ensembles. In all of his works from the 1890s, no individual stands out. Each figure is carefully dissolved into larger color harmonies and into an overall floral patterning fusing wallpaper, upholstery fabrics, dresses, tablecloths, vases of flowers, and delicate, “floral” brushstrokes.

IV. “We formed a little world of our own”: Nabis Aestheticism and the Narcissism of Modern Art

In the Symbolist and especially the Nabis retreat from modern life into a higher world of the aesthetic imagination, there was from the start the potential for an overly precious, introspection and aestheticizing verging on narcissism. On the one hand, this was a problem as old as courtly refinement which was widely criticized already in late medieval sermons, satires, romances, and allegories. 52 With the Renaissance invention of Art, each century ushered in a new level of aesthetic self-consciousness and refinement along with a new critique. Vuillard and his patrons would have known the seventeenth-century French literary group which named itself Les precieuses as well as Molière’s satire of social-climbing middle-class refinement, Les Précieuses Ridicules. 53

All too aware of her own considerable preciosity, Vuillard’s patron, Misia Natanson, used her memoirs to dismiss aristocratic snobbery and pretension on a regular basis while admitting she was nicknamed Snobinette at the age of sixteen when she began her modernist salon. Yet even as she dismissed old fashioned hierarchies, she devoted her life to presiding over a small club of modernist writers, artists, composers, and musicians. After dumping her first husband for a rich newspaper tycoon, she lived in the lap of luxury, decorating one lavish residence after another. 54 It was Misia who asked him to build her a large yacht complete with a piano where Caruso entertained and where she lived for weeks anchored in the Seine when she needed to escape her Parisian apartments. 55 Evident on every page of her memoirs, her narcissism was particularly clear in the way she experienced the death of her friend, Mallarmé. Dismissing the grief of his many intimates, Misia mourns the disappearance of the only man fully transfigured by her own musical genius.

What did they know of that beloved face who had not see it through the haze of pipe- smoke, imbued with the radiance which my music had kindled in him? For the first time I realized that something irreparable had happened. Who would now listen to Beethoven and Schubert as he did? 56

Although a self-absorbed aesthetic refinement was as old as court culture, it took on a new importance to the major art movements of the late nineteenth century including the Pre- Raphaelites, the Aesthetic Movement, Art Nouveau, the Rosecrucians, Symbolism, and the Nabis. Artists, critics, and writers allied to these movements pioneered a new level of self- indulgent and unapologetic narcissism. 57 In Wilde’s essay, The Decay of Lying (1889), the first principle of good art is its self-reflection.

. . . art never expresses anything but itself . . . In no case does it reproduce its age . . . all bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature and elevating them into ideals. . . . To us, who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. . . . Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life. . . . external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings . . . Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art .” 58

Narcissus himself was reborn as a hero. Although some late medieval poets had already transformed him into the perfect lover devoted to his beloved even until death, Aesthetic and Symbolist writers and artists went further in making Narcissus allegorize the higher, solitary fidelity to beauty and art at all costs, transforming his death into an aesthetic Liebestod. 59 In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Narcissus was frequently invoked as the paragon of a perfect beauty. Dorian’s young face, real and painted, became a captivating mirror which completely rejuvenated the art of the painter and revealed the love of beauty as life’s highest pursuit. For Dorian, the portrait taught him “the secret of his life . . . It had taught him to love his own beauty.” Like Misia, who boasted about kissing her own reflection before a royal ball (see below), Dorian kissed his portrait. More importantly for my argument, Wilde’s Narcissus imaged a perfect beauty beyond all mundane life (Echo) which captivated experienced lovers of art including the jaded aristocrat, Henry Wooten, and the painter of the portrait, Basil Hallward. Even as Wilde used Narcissus ironically in his critique of Aestheticism, the Greek figure also represented the Aesthetic movement’s ideal of a higher, autonomous beauty and a tragic death. 60 Here is the painter of Dorian’s portrait, confessing his secret passion.

“Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art. . . . I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face . . . Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you. . . . I had drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak . . . You had leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland and seen in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own face. And it had all been what art should be--unconscious, ideal, and remote.” 61

While Vuillard avoided subjects tied to narcissism in the 1890s, 62 his art of the refined aesthetic interior lent itself to the narcissistic tendencies of his patrons, especially Misia Natanson, whose identity was largely fashioned from being in the center of an admiring throng of cultural celebrities and the social elites they attracted. At a time when artists, writers, and composers had become celebrities, the society hostess could reinvent herself as a kind of cultural entrepreneur, a hostess of artistic celebrity. 63 Misia made this clear in every name-dropping paragraph of her memoirs. Indeed, her life story is largely a catalogue of her friendships with famous writers, musicians, and artists, her supposed muse-like influence over their productions, and the great love for her she inspired in them. 64

Although not completely devoid of a larger social awareness, especially when it came to the anti- Semitism rampant in France, 65 Misia grew up in that strange and new, late nineteenth-century bubble which mixed aristocrats, commercial elites, and cultural figures – what one might call high bohemia – with its new notions of cultural aristocracy. Potentially open to all and thus reassuringly universal and modern, the new cultural aristocracy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was all but closed in practice, limited as it was to talented writers, artists, and composers, and to the wealthy patrons who bought their way into the club.

I leave the roots of Misia’s narcissism to armchair psychologists. This trait was well established by her mid-teens in an episode she proudly highlighted in her memoirs. Just before her marriage at sixteen, she was invited to a royal ball at the court of Brussels. Arriving at the Royal Palace, she saw her sumptuous new dress in a large mirror at the entrance and “was thunderstruck. And when I realized that it was really me, I rushed to the mirror and passionately kissed my own reflection in front of an army of astonished flunkeys.” 66 Misia’s narcissism was reinforced when she began presiding over a salon of important, older men drawn by her husband’s avant-garde journal and by his gifted, intelligent, charming, and beautiful wife. Here is Misia’s own account from her memoirs.

We now settled down in a flat on the rue St. Florentin in Paris, which soon became the center of the Revue Blanche, established by Thadée and his brother Alexandre. This was how I found myself quite naturally in the company of Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, of Lautrec, Vuillard and Bonnard . . . of Léon Blum, Félix Fénéon, Ghéon (who exasperated me with all his chatter), Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard (whose wife did all the housework), Henri de Régnier, the charming Mirbeau and his wife (the heroine of La Calvaire), Jarry, La Jeunesse, Coolus, Debussy (married to a little fawn-like creature, very dark and slim), Vollard, the fascinating Colette, with her triangular face and her wasp waist, so tightly squeezed in that it gave her the silhouette of a school-girl, and her husband Willy . . . With a few exceptions they were all in their late twenties while I was only sixteen. They infuriated me by calling me “Snobinette” . . . We formed a little world of our own, which was laughed at by those who were not allowed into it. Pierre Louys, who lived in the rue Gluck, got a few friends together one day to listen to a new masterpiece. It was Pelléas, played by Debussy himself on an upright piano. (He also sang all the parts.) I was the only woman present. During the performance, a footman in a white jacket handed round cocktails. . . . it was only several months later, when Pelléas was given at the Opéra Comique, that I became aware of its magic. I went to hear it first, at a rehearsal ... suddenly at a passage which begins ‘Voilà ce qu’il écrit à son frère Pelléas . . .’ my nerves responded like taut strings to a bow, and I realized I was witnessing a miracle. It was my first love. . . .” 67

Beyond the virtuoso namedropping of this passage, we can see Misia’s pride in presiding over the most exclusive, modernist cultural club in all France. Except for a brief account of her involvement in a taxi-squad to bring wounded French soldiers back to Paris (which she led in her limousine), her memoirs offer no discussion of social, political, and economic realities, this despite the growing problems of the day and the devastation of two world wars. When social or political realities do enter, almost always as a characteristically rude “intrusion,” they arise in connection with an artist or one of Misia’s personal difficulties. 68 In one of her most sustained discussions, which lasts two paragraphs, her understanding of the needs of the working classes focuses on culture, not wages or working conditions. If they can’t have bread, let them have Debussy.

“Adolescent Socialism was beginning to gain strength and vigor, and was disturbing many a conscience hitherto cheerfully ignorant of social facts. Fashion, which owed it to itself to be progressive, had already thrust the tip of its nose into it, and the salons had raised their lorgnettes to view the miseries of the working classes. How was it that they had not realized until now that the people had a right to culture? Shame on such a civilization! Not a moment should be lost organizing artistic entertainment which would be within everyone’s reach.” 69

Despite these qualities in Vuillard’s most important patron of the 1890s, we can let the artist off the hook for a number of reasons. Despite a certain self-preoccupation of his own seen in the fifty volume diary he kept throughout his long life, Vuillard’s art of the 1890s was free of any glitz. Indeed, he shunned the glamour pursued by his patrons even as his art remade their lives into ordinary moments of quiet contemplation and domestic tranquility. Misia may have lived grandly but we look in vain in Vuillard’s early paintings for signs of her large residences, lavish clothes, and extensive art collection. It is hard to find an artist of the 1890s further removed from wealth and splendor than Vuillard. Nowhere do we see the sumptuous costume pieces and courtly interiors of the sort painted by Romako and Gause and translated into Symbolist aesthetics by their modernist counterpart, Gustave Klimt. Nor do we see the Aesthetic Movement preciosity of Whistler’s Peacock Room or the exquisitely decorated rooms which Dorian Gray praised to the artist who painted his portrait.

Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts? I remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man . . . who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp--there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. 70

Vuillard’s rejection of outward magnificence in the 1890s is even more clear in the small size of most of his works from that period. Many paintings are barely a foot tall and carry little in the way of visual effect or interest from afar. They are as subtle in their size as their subject matter and artistic handling. And they are sized down for the intimate viewing of one or two persons at most, more like drawings or prints. The collapse of this intimist aesthetic after 1902 only makes its qualities more apparent in retrospect. For after 1902, Vuillard happily succumbed to an increasingly lavish, richly colored, descriptive style which flattered the sumptuous lives of his increasingly wealthy patrons like Jos and Lucie Hessel, Marguerite Chapin, and Yvonne Printemps.

Mapping the Spectrum of Aesthetic Narcissicm

It is also worthwhile to distinguish between different kinds and degrees of aesthetic narcissism in the cultural practices of the late nineteenth century. In the writings of decadent Symbolists such as Huysmans, we find an extreme and explicit narcissism rooted in contempt for modern life and for modern humanity. Pursuing a radical retreat from all contact with human beings, with floors and walls thickly carpeted to keep out all sound and windows covered to darken the gloomy rooms, Huysmans’ jaded and depressed misanthrope, Des Esseintes goes to elaborate lengths to create an aesthetically environment for himself, far from the supposed ugliness of modern life and its “vile hordes”. 71 Even if one puts aside Des Esseintes’ profound misogyny, few readers of the day identified with his brand of introverted aestheticism, born from years of debauchery, spiritual exhaustion and contempt for almost everyone but himself. 72

In sharp contrast, the aesthetic retreat cultivated by the Nabis offered a very different world of human beauty, tenderness, friendship, love, and maternal feeling. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a world more removed from the dark, suicidal solitude of Huysmans than the luminous, flower- filled, middle-class world of Vuillard, Bonnard, and Denis. With Huymans and the Nabis artists marking opposite ends of the spectrum of introverted modernist aestheticism, one might distinguish between a misanthropic aestheticizing of decadent Symbolism (and its more moderate expression in the Pre-Raphaelites, Rosecrucians, and Aesthetic Movement), and the inward-turning aestheticism of the Nabis and the Symbolist mainstream exemplified by Gauguin, Redon, Van Gogh, and Hodler. Of these artists, none embraced ordinary, middle class domestic life more fully than Vuillard. None painted so many scenes of quiet, even mundane activities – the ones despised by Huysmans and subordinated by most of the Symbolists and many of the Nabis. Even Denis, for all his interest in family and children, succumbed to the siren call of Christian and mystical allegories. Of the other leading Nabis, Serusier pursued an equally obscure Bretonese primitivism while Ranson and Roussel chose the most traditional of all modernist subjects: the soft-core female nude.

It is also patently unfair to blame any artist for not facing up to reality, especially an artist in the 1890s when modernists were fleeing modern life for the timeless, the universal, the mythic, the imaginary, the heroic, the visionary, and the spiritual. There were only a handful of artists like Constantin Meunier and Kathe Kollwitz focusing on the conditions and experiences of the working class. On the other hand, the Nabis and Symbolist retreat into a “higher” world of artistic imagination was itself a response to modern life and to an earlier, socially engaged generation of modern artists such as Manet, Degas, and Lautrec. It may be easier to comprehend the perfect serenity and harmony – musical, aesthetic, and emotional - of Vuillard’s insulated interiors – when we set these works against the fundamental political, social, and economic changes sweeping Europe in the 1890s. Here we might remember that the art museum itself was widely understood in the nineteenth century as a spiritual sanctuary from the brutalizing changes of modern life. 73 Chiseled for all time in Roman letting above the entrance to the temple-like St. Louis Art Museum was the maxim: ART STILL HAS TRUTH. SEEK REFUGE THERE. 1 For an overview of Nabis aesthetics, see Elizabeth Prelinger, “The Art of the Nabis: From Symbolism to Modernism,” in Patricia Eckert Boyer, ed., The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 81-134.

2 For the preoccupation of the nineteenth-century middle class with its own inwardness, see Peter Gay, The Naked Heart, New York: W. W. Norton, 1995,

3 Bonnard, “Hommages à Maurice Denis, “ L’art sacré,” Dec 1937, p. 160, quoted in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, Washington, DC. Phillips Collection, 2003, p. 55.

4 In the early 1990s, my former colleague, Laura Hendrickson, first introduced me to the central importance of Wagnerist aesthetics to fin-de-siècle modernism in France and England. It was the subject of her Brown University PhD thesis. At that time, I was working on a book project on musical politics and aesthetics in Renaissance and Baroque art with a focus on Vermeer. For color and music in Romantic art, see George Mras, "Ut Pictura Musica: A Study of Delacroix’s Paragone", Art Bulletin, 45, Sept. 1963, 266-71.For Wagnerism in Symbolist literature and art and in later modernism, see Raymond Furness, Wagner and Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982 (esp. ch. 1- 2 on Symbolism and Decadent literature); Emily Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s, Oxford University Press, 2002; and Heath Lees, Mallarmé and Wagner, Ashgate, 2007; Lisa Norris, “Painting Around the Piano: Fantin-Latour, Wagnerism, and the Musical in Art,” in Marsha Morton and Peter Schmunk, eds., The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Garland, 2000, pp. 143-176; Peter Schmunk, “Van Gogh in Neuen and Paris: The Origins of a Musical Paradigm for Painting,” in Morton and Schmunk, eds., Arts Entwined, ibid, pp. 177-208; Paul Smith, "Was Seurat's Art Wagnerian? and what if it was?" Apollo, July, 1991, 21-28. For music and Nabis or Symbolist art, see Gerhard Vaughan, "Maurice Denis and the Sense of Music", Oxford Art Journal, 7, 1, 1984, 38-48; Prelinger, op. cit., pp. 105-107; Jumeau-Lafond, Jean-David, “Maurice Denis and Music,” in Maurice Denis. Earthly Paradise, 2006, Paris: Musée d’Orsay / Montreal: Museum of Fine Arts, pp. 286-288; Walter Frisch, "Music and Jugenstil," Critical Inquiry, 17, 1, 1990, 138-161; Laurinda Dixon, "Art and Music at the Salons de la Rose + Croix, 1892-1897", in Gabriel Weisberg and Laurinda Dixon, eds., The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, 1988?, 165-186; and Katherine Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siecle, Ashgate Publishers, 2011 (forthcoming) with chapters on Wagnerism in Denis and Vuillard.

More general discussions include Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting. A Study in Comparative Ideas from Turner to Schoenberg, London: Cassell, 1973; Franzsepp Würtenberg, Malerei und Musik: Die Geschichte des Verhaltens zweier Künste zueinander, Frankfurt, Bern, and Las Vegas, 1979; Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound, Berkeley, 1993; Charlotte Eyerman, “Piano Playing in Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture,” in James Parakilas, ed., Piano Roles, New Haven: Yale, 1999. 216-235; Peter Vergo, That Divine Order: Music and the Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, London & New York: Phaidon, 2005; Peter Vergo, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism, and the Visual Arts from Kandinsky to John Cage, London and New York: Phaidon, 2010. For musical culture and Romantic interiority as a mentality of the nineteenth century, see Peter Gay, “The Art of Listening,” in idem, The Naked Heart, op. cit., pp. 11-35.

5 For French interest in Wagner and his philosophical counterpart, Schopenhauer, in the 1880s, see the previous footnote. Also see A. G. Lehman, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1895, Oxford, 1968, and Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1880-1900, Chicago, 1981. For Wagnerism in early twentieth-century French art and theater, see Juliet Bellow’s forthcoming book on the Ballet Russe (Ashgate, 2012).

6 Misia Godebska, later Misia Natanson, Misia Edwards, and Misia Sert, was the daughter of a Polish sculptor whose memoirs were published in French as Misia (1952) and later in an English translation, Misia and the Muses, New York: John Day Company, 1953. In her memoirs, she describes how she grew up in the mansion of her grandfather, Francois Servais, a wealthy violin virtuoso who married a Russian aristocrat. Her grandmother gathered the highest nobles, modern artists and writers in her giant, art-covered salon (pp. 12-13) and at the dining room which seated sixty (p. 13). Located in Hall outside Brussels, the house had some twelve pianos which were in constant use.

“In this house, always filled with artists, music resounded everywhere. Apart from the five concert pianos in the reception hall, there were seven or eight others distributed in other rooms, none of which remained long out of use. My childish ears were so saturated with music that I do not remember ever learning my notes. I knew them long before I knew the alphabet.” (p. 13) . . . “The dinners were more magnificent than ever. All the Belgian aristocracy met around the table with its exquisite Bohemian glasses. Night and day the walls of the great house echoed with music that delighted my childish ears. The artists, there was no doubt, felt at home. It was the period [late 1880s] when everyone was trying to interpret Wagner on every piano. . . . [she then tells of a Russian cousin who became the mistress of a prince before committing suicide at 19 when he became engaged to another woman.] . . . Among all those temperamental artists and their rather wild romanticism, we, the children, were left to our own devices.” (p. 17). She claimed she played Bach fuges before she knew how to read or write (p. 16). While still a little girl, she played Beethoven sitting on the lap of Lizst (p. 17). At seven or eight, she moved into a house built by her father where her stepmother presided over a large salon of more conservative artists, musicians, and writers. (p. 21) Sent to a harsh convent school, “the only happy day of the week was that of my piano lesson” with Fauré, “this musician of exceptional quality, who put all his heart into my lessons, and whose remarkable teaching gave me so profound a knowledge of piano that I have drawn joy from it all my life. . . . He first knew me at Valvins, where my father had bought a house near the one belonging to Mallarmé. Fauré heard me play when I was not more than six or seven years old, and had been so surprised by my efforts that he begged my parents to entrust him with my musical studies. . . . In the seven years that I spent at Sacré Coeur, . .. Fauré . . . was the only ray of light.” (p. 24) After her stepmother’s untimely death, her father married his mistress, a Belgian Marquise, and moved into yet another house with a grand salon. (p. 25) At 14, she ran away from home and settled in Paris where Fauré arranged for her to teach piano to aristocrats (pp. 28-30). On her fifteenth birthday, she became engaged to Thadée Natanson. “Fauré . . . burst into tears when he heard f my engagement. He wanted to build up for me the career of a virtuoso, and begged me to give up for ever the idea of marriage”. (p. 31) That year, she met Van der Velde who “made me read Huysmans and Maeterlinck. Là-bas made a deep impression on me. It was a sort of initiation.” (p. 32). “There were only two pianos in the new house, but there was still a lot of music going on under its roof, which sheltered a crowd of rabid Wagnerians. My uncle Franz Servais was finishing an opera to a libretto by Leconte de Lisle, called L’Appolonide . . . Parsifal had just been produced for the first time” (p. 33). Her uncle gave her a dowry of 300,000 gold francs which Misia spent on new clothes. (p. 34).

7 “. . . it was only several months later, when Pelléas was given at the Opéra Comique, that I became aware of its magic. I went to hear it first, at a rehearsal ... suddenly at a passage which begins “Voilà ce qu’il écrit à son frère Pelléas . . . “ my nerves responded like taut strings to a bow, and I realized I was witnessing a miracle. It was my first love. . . . I did not see Debussy until the next day, at the dress rehearsal . . . This time I burst into tears and we embraced. . . .For the next two years every time Pelléas was given I went to hear it. I, who had made such fun of the Bayreuth enthusiasts who repeatedly endlessly the same motifs of Wagner, could now sit at the piano playing twenty or fifty times the beloved passages of my Pelléas.” ( pp. 36-37)

8 First voiced by Schiller, the art-music analogy emerged as a central idea only with Romanticism, especially Schopenhauer, Delacroix (Journals), Mme. De Stael (De l’Allemagne), E. T. A. Hoffmann (Kreisleriana) and George Sand (Consuelo). From the 1860s, it took on greater currency thanks to the English Aesthetic movement (Pater, Whistler, Symons) and French Symbolists such as Baudelaire (“Salon of 1846,” “Exposition Universelle 1855,” and Correspondances) and Mallarmé. This synopsis comes from Vaughan, “Maurice Denis and the Sense of Music,” op. cit., pp. 39-41.

9 This passage is cited in the chapter on music in Hugh Honour, Romanticism, New York: Harper and Row 1979, p. 126, and is discussed with other passages in David Powell, While the Music Lasts: The Representation of Music in the Works of George Sand, Rosemont Publishers, 2001.

10 Walter Pater, “Leonardo da Vinci” (1869) reprinted in Pater, The Renaissance, 1877

11 Pater, “Winckelmann,” (1867), ) reprinted in Pater, The Renaissance, 1877

12 Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” (1871) reprinted in Pater, The Renaissance, 1877. Pater is widely discussed in the literature on late nineteenth-century musical aesthetics. See, for example, Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound, Berkeley, 1993. The passages I have selected come from my own reading.

13 Pater, “School of Giorgione, op. cit.

“In the art of painting, the attainment of this ideal condition, this perfect interpretation of the subject with colour and design, depends, of course, in great measure, on dexterous choice of that subject, or phase of subject; and such choice is one of the secrets of Giorgione's school. It is the school of genre, and employs itself mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself without an articulated story.”

14 Gauguin, Letter to André Fontainas from Tahiti, March, 1899, translated in John Rewald, Paul Gauguin, pp. 21-24, and reprinted in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 75). The quotation comes from a longer discussion of musical aesthetics in Delacroix, Beethoven, and Symbolist art. This quotation came to my attention in Vaughan, “Maurice Denis and the Sense of Music,” op. cit.

15 According to the entry in Nabis 1888-1900, exh. cat. , Zurich and Paris, 1993, p. 434, cat. no. 247, the woman is probably Bonnard’s partner, model, and future wife, Marthe, or perhaps Berthe Schaedlin. See Nabis, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1993, p. 434.

16 Teodor de Wtyzewa, “Notes sur la peinture wagnérienne et le Salon de 1886,” La Revue wagnérienne 2, May 8, 1886, 100-113, partially translated and reprinted in Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories, Berkeley, 1994, p. 149

17 Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” trans. and reprinted in Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings, trans. P. E. Charvet, Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 330-331.

18 As a title, Reverie went back through Impressionism to Romantic Realists such as Courbet and Homer. Courbet painted Reverie: Portrait of Gabrielle Borreau in 1862 (Chicago Art Institute); followed by Winslow Homer (1875, Portland Art Museum); Rossetti, Reverie, (1868, drawing), Albert Moore, A Revery (1892), George Lambdin, Rosy Reverie (1865, US Federal Reserve System); Mary Cassatt (1891-2), Richard Miller, (c. 1920); Aman-Jean (1909), Mucha (1896) and a pastel by Vuillard dated ca. 1890. See Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., I, p. 121, cat. II-84.

“Reverie” was also used for paintings of musical interiors such as Edward Harper, A Reverie (1890s, private collection); Henry Stock’s A Musician’s Reverie (1888, Harrow School Collection), and Frank Dicksee’s “A Reverie” (1895, Liverpool). See Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound, Berkeley, 1993, figs. 64-66.

19 For swelling waves of decorative sound,” see Prelinger, op. cit., p. 107 who discusses this drawing and illustrates it on p. 109. On pp. 105-107, Prelinger offers a synopsis of the importance of music in Nabis aesthetics, especially Denis and Bonnard. She does not discuss Bonnard’s Rêverie or Denis’ Our Souls in Slow Movements.

20 See Nabis 1888-1900, 1993-93, op. cit., p. 147, cat. no. 35, which notes that both women were accomplished musicians.

21 H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals, 1871, p. 112, quoted in Gay, Naked Heart, op. cit., p. 353, n. 59.

22 Between 1890 and 1895, Vuillard collected 180 Japanese prints. See Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard. Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, 3 vols., Milan: Skira, 2003, Vol. 1, p. 80.

23 The “kindred spirit” theme in Denis encompassed a wide variety of subjects from landscape to interiors to religious subjects including the Annunciation, Visitation, and even the Supper at Emmaus which Denis transformed by adding pairs of silent women. Among the notables example of Denis’s kindred spirit imagery is the lithograph, Tendresse (1893) and Two Sisters Under a Lamp (1891). See Nabis 1888-1900, 1993-93, op. cit., p. 445, cat. 257; p. 147, cat. no. 35. In his engravings for Dante’s Divine Comedy (1860s), Gustave Doré capitalized on Dante’s theme of two solitary figures contemplating the cosmos to fashion numerous “kindred spirit” landscapes, most imaged as contemplative, pro- Symbolist nocturnes. Schwabe’s poster for the first exhibition of the Salon Rose Croix (1892) offered another Symbolist image of feminine spiritual bonding and ascent toward divine light. And Gauguin introduced a pair of bonding, spiritually enlightened women in his large, Tahitian mural, Where Do we Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?(1897-98) . In a letter, Gauguin described these as “two figures dressed in purple confide their thoughts to one another” while a seated figure crouching below “raises its arms and stares in astonishment upon these two, who dare to think of their destiny”. (Letter to Daniel Monfried, Feb 1998, quoted in George Shackelford, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” in Gauguin Tahiti, Boston: MFA, 2004, p. 177.

24 “Ce fut un mystère religieux”. For the whole cycle, see Pierre Cailler, Catalogue raissoné de l’oeuvre grave et lithographié de Maurice Denis, Geneva, 1968, no. 107-119.

25 Misia and the Muses, op. cit., pp. 41-42

26 One thinks of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll composed as a wedding present for his second wife.

27 “Dieu sait bien que je suis un chanteur, que j’ai joué de toutes les cordes de mon coeur; c’est mon grand rêve de l’amour infini, de l’oeuvre immense, de la sainteté parfaite . . . et des choses blanches, vagues, des choses belles, une musique très haute”. See Maurice Denis, Journal¸ 3 vols, Paris, 1957-59, vol. 1, p. 83, cited in Nabis 1888-1900, op. cit., p. 446.

28 Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., I, p. 309.

29 Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., I, pp. 134-136, 138-139, 180-182, 191,

30 Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., II, reproduces 30 nudes made in two short periods (1902-3 and 1905). 31 In her memoirs, Misia described a long walk at dusk along the Yvonne River near the Natanson’s country house at Villeneuve. “Looking dreamy and grave, he led me beside the river amongst the tall birches with their silvery trunks. He moved slowly among the yellowing grass, and I fell in with his mood; we did not speak. The day was closing in rapidly, so we took a short cut across a beetroot field. Our silhouettes were insubstantial shadows against a pale sky. The ground was rough, I tripped on a root and almost fell; Vuillard stopped abruptly to help me regain my balance. Our eyes met. In the deepening shadows I could see the sad gleam of his glance. He burst into sobs. It was the most beautiful declaration of love ever made to me.” See Misia and the Muses, op. cit. p. 52

32 John Ruskin, Of Queen's Gardens, an essay published in his book, Sesame and Lilies, 1865.

33 For bourgeois domesticity in late nineteenth-century France, see Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth Century France, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995, 218-244 and Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class, Princeton, 1981, ch, 4.

34 See Silverman, op. cit.; Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Albany, 1984; James McMillan, France and Women, 1719-1914, New York: Routledge Press, 2000; Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts. The New Woman in Fin de Siécle France, Univ. of Chicago, 2002.

35 Gustav Larroumet, “L’Art décoratifs et les femmes,” Revue des arts décoratifs, 16, 1896, 100-106, cited in Silverman op. cit., 201-202

36 Georges Berger, “Appel aux femmes françaises,” Revue des arts décoratifs, 16, 1896, 97-99. Berger was president of the Central Union of the Decorative Arts.

37 The woman who headed the Women’s Committee of the Central Union of Decorative Arts in Paris affirmed these values in her 1894 report, Woman and the Decorative Arts (1894).

“Does not women organize the home? Does she not preside over the arrangements of the interior? Does she not choose the furnishings, porcelains, bronzes, laces, silverware, tapestries, all those trinkets and a thousand things that give a residence its elegance and charm? And does she not select those numerous objects that add to female beauty: the textures, laces, embroideries, jewels, flowers, etc. etc.?”

The author continued by noting how women were themselves objects of feminine artistry in their clothing and cosmetics. See Silverman, op. cit., pp. 194-197.

38 See, for example, Leader Scott’s essay, “Woman at Work: Their Functions in Art” published in Magazine of Art in 1884. After noting the female emancipation has opened the possibility of artistic greatness for a few, highly talented women artists, he defines artistic genius as male and spends the rest of his discussion on a lower order of mundane decorative arts where far more women could find real success.

“A painted frieze and a dado would adorn a room much more eloquently than paper stamped by machinery. . . . A frieze of children for the household drawing room, would touch the house with poetry. . . . there is happily a large class of women who have no need to earn their bread and to whom art and the practice of art may yet be a solace and a delight. And here we come to what is after all woman’s true mission – that of the presiding genius of the home. Here all her artistic proclivities may be brought into full play, as the beautifier and refiner of the household dwelling place. . . . In the wife a cultivated taste, even without manual dexterity, is a great beautifier.”

For this text, see Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1815-1900, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 771.

In his Sex and Character (190), Otto Weiniger defined genius as masculine universal knowledge, self-consciousness, morality, and quest for immortality. “From genius itself, the common quality of all the different manifestations of genius, woman is debarred.” (First Part, Chapter 4, Talent and Genius, p. 62. In Chapter 5, he continued, “It is to be remembered that even in the case of drawing and painting women have now had opportunities for at least two centuries. Every one knows how many girls learn to draw and sketch, and it cannot be said that there has not yet been time for results were results possible. As there are so few female painters with the smallest importance in the history of art, it must be that there is something in the nature of things against it. As a matter of fact, the painting and etching of women is no more than a sort of elegant, luxurious handiwork. The sensuous, physical element of colour is more suitable for them than the intellectual work of formal line-drawing, and hence it is, that whereas women have acquired some small distinction in painting they have gained none in drawing. The power of giving form to chaos is with those in whom the most universal memory has made the widest comprehension possible; it is a quality of the masculine genius.” (p. 72).

39 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (1891), ch. 4

40 In addition to his many paintings on the theme of motherhood and the Madonna, Denis made some twenty prints on the theme including eight birth announcements (Cailler, op. cit., nos. 88, 90, 91, 104, 122, 123, 129, 158); four first communion announcements (Cailler, nos. 126, 130, 134, 139); eight scenes of mothers and children (Cailler, nos. 103, 120, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 230), and two Madonnas (Cailler, nos. 140, 142). Most of these depict his wife, Marthe, and her four daughters.

41 For three years following the birth of his niece, Annette in 1898, Vuillard painted some twenty-five paintings focused on the theme of small children. Almost all of these works depict Annette in the care of her mother, Marie Vuillard Roussel, or her grandmother, Madame Vuillard.

42 Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., I, with examples reproduced on pp. 123, 124, 130, 131, 226, 230, 232, 236, 237, 243, 245, 246, 248, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 269, 270, 281, 291, 300, 306, 307 (2 examples), 309, 310, (311?), 315, 322, 323, 324, 325, 332, 339, 340, 383, 431, 436, 483, 495.

43 Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., I, p. 300, cat. IV-132.

44 I use “absorption” to credit Michael Fried’s important work on Chardin’s aesthetic of absorption and on the earlier tradition of Dutch Baroque genre painters who created stilled, meditative interiors (Ellinga, Ter Borch, Vermeer).

45 The 1890s interiors also feature scenes of his mother preparing food, sweeping floors, putting away linens, and doing other household work.

46 See Salomon and Cogeval, Vuillard, op. cit., I, pp. 301, 341-348.

47 See the illustration in Salomon and Cogeval, I, p. 349.

48 Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire, Chicago: Swallow Press, 1946, p. 57.

49 August Strindberg, Inferno, 1896-7, trans. Mary Sandbach, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 204

50 Her romantic independence also owed something to the casual pursuit of destructive love affairs common both to nobles and middle class elites at the tie. Her father had multiple mistresses including his aunt. As a teenager, her uncle began a twelve year affair with the much older wife of the Director of the Music Academy in Brussels. To maintain financial support for her husband’s projects, Misia became the wife of a Parisian media tycoon who continued to have multiple mistresses, one of whom Misia helped him procure, before he eventually divorced her for a life of complete debauchery. Misia later pursued “true love” with the Spanish painter, Sert, who also continued to have multiple affairs before running off with a countess.

51 For Misia Natanson (later Misia Edwards and Misia Sert), see Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, New York: Knopf, 1980; Edmonde Charles-Roux, Le Temps Chanel, 1979 (English ed, Chanel and Her World, Vendome Press, 2005); Misia and the Muses, op. cit. For Misia and Vuillard, see Gloria Groom, “Coming of Age, Patrons and Projects 1890-99,” in Gloria Groom, Beyond the Easel, Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930, Chicago Art Institute, 2001, esp. pp. 38-41, 126-134; and Guy Cogeval, Edouard Vuillard, Montreal Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art, 2003, pp. 186-191.

52 One early fifteenth-century group of Parisian poets was nicknamed the “fumistes” because their verse displayed an ambiguous, mysterious, ultra-poetic language which obscured all meaning in smoky metaphors.

Although the Romance of the Rose used a Fountain of Narcissus to allegorize the emptiness of earthly beauty and courtly refinement, other late medieval court poets used Narcissus to celebrate the lover’s pursuit of beauty and love, making his reflection into the female beloved. Here is one example from Bernard de Ventadour.

I never had mastery of myself, nor was I ever mine from the moment when she let me see into her eyes, into a mirror which pleases me much. Mirror, since I mirrored myself in you, sighs from deep down have slain me, and thus I was lost as, in the pool, the fair Narcissus was lost. 53 See Domna Stanton, “The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women,” Yale French Studies, 62, 1981, 107-134.

54 In her memoirs, Misia approvingly quoted Jean Costeau’s published tribute to her which included the following passage. By then she was married to her third husband, the Spanish painter, Sert.

“Between short rests in apartments that she adorns and then abandons as a bird its perch, Madame Sert lives on the top floor of the Hotel Meurice. When I became her friend, she had just left the hotel for as kind of penthouse on the Quai Voltaire. The salon was bathed in green light on one side by the Seine, and in orange light on the other by Bonnard’s murals. Misia’s scissors had been at work on these murals in order to make them follow exactly the line of the walls. A scandal, you think? We have the wives of does and great priestesses. We have Muses – any amount of them! But much more rare and indispensable for the arts, which are always in danger of getting paunchy, are those women so feminine that they bring a spirit of destruction into the temple . . . Misia, through her love and her disrespect, constantly kneaded the dough and prevented it from settling. Only those artists who were string and feared to be accepted as idols drew any benefit from this iconoclast, who whipped life like a spinning top . . .’ ‘So there we are, face to face with one of those women to whom Stendhal accorded genius. Genius for walking, laughing, putting one in one’s place, handling a fan, getting into a carriage, designing a diadem. This genius Misia possessed to such a point that in writing Thomas l’Imposteur, try as I did to concentrate my mind on the San Severina, she, Misia, became automatically, come what might, the model for the Princesse de Bormes.’”

See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., p.

55 “It was a perfect boat. It was one hundred feet long and sixteen feet wide/ . . . . A companion-way led down into a passage which gave on to the reception room on one side and servants quarters on the other. There was a large dining room, a sitting room, and, apart from our bedroom, five other cabins, each containing two or three beds, which we could put at the disposal of our visitors. . . . It was in this room [the master bedroom] that I placed my piano, and I preferred it to all the others. I loved my boat so much that even after we returned to Paris I often went to live in it for weeks at a time. . . . It was a joy to know that I thus had several residences to go back to, according to my whim. (I had kept the ground floor which we had in the Hôtel du Rhin, in addition to the flat in the rue de Rivoli.) That was probably the period in my life when I had the fullest measure of all that a woman could desire. There was really nothing more to wish for. “

To be fair to Misia, she followed this up with a comment about lazing in her rocking chair on her yacht and thinking, “will my life always be so insipid and unhappy”. See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., pp. 80-81.

56 “Those were terrible days. A crowd of friends had arrived whose grief only emphasized and even offended mine. I did not want to share my misery with anyone. What did they know of that beloved face who had not see it through the haze of pipe-smoke, imbued with the radiance which my music had kindled in him? For the first time I realized that something irreparable had happened. Who would now listen to Beethoven and Schubert as he did? See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., p. 49.

57 The narcissism of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement was frequently criticized by contemporary writers grounded in Naturalism, Impressionism, and the modernism of Cezanne, including Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s 1894 review of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean which rejected Aestheticism as “sterile, without greatness, and without true humanity” in its cultivation of a “morbid, Narcissus-like beauty . . . every kind of beauty apart from the one, great and inexpressible beauty of existence”. See the passage in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1815-1900, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 872. Also see Octave Mirbeau, “The Artists of the Soul,” (1894) which attacked the Pre- Raphaelites and Rosecrucians. An excerpt is available in Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories, op. cit., pp. 277-279.

58 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” first published in The Nineteenth Century, 1889 and reprinted in Wilde, Intentions, 1891. I have drawn from the selection in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, op. cit., pp. 860-861.

59 For Narcissus in late nineteenth-century France, see Steven Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection, Chicago, 1995. For the aesthetics of the liebestod, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Liebestod und Femme fatale. Der Austausch sozialer Energien zwischen Oper, Literatur und Film, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2004. The Symbolists also invented a more misogynistic Narcissa who kissed her reflection in the mirror and destroyed men by turning in on her own, more compelling beauty. Literary examples include Henri de Régnier’s Giulietta, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, and, a naturalist example, Emile Zola’s Nana. Artists treating this new theme include Knopf, Magaud, Fichel, and Stevens. These are discussed in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, Oxford, 1986, pp. 144-151.

60 In chapter seven, the older and jaded Lord Henry Wotton uses the beautiful portrait of the young nobleman, Dorian, to teach him “the secret of his life . . . It had taught him to love his own beauty.” Narcissus is a leitmotiv in Wilde’s novel from the opening chapter where Henry Wotton compares Dorian’s perfect beauty to Narcissus.

“Upon my word, Basil, . . . I really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you-- well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.”

In chapter eight, Dorian also sees himself in these terms.

“A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times.”

While Wilde’s novel offers a critique of Aestheticism, it also betrays the author’s personal devotion to the religion of beauty and the higher emotions of art.

61 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 9.

62 Between 1890 and 1910, Vuillard only painted two images of women at the mirror and both excluded any depiction of the body or suggestion of bodily beauty.

63 In her memoirs, she justifies the search for a much larger summer house as a necessity to put up the many artists living with her for extended periods. “Soon the house at Valvins became too small to hold all of my Vernisseurs – the name given by Valloton to my artist friends. So Thadée and I started to look for a large house on the river, not too far from Paris.” See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., pp. 42-43

64 In her memoirs, she describes herself as the great love of her three husbands and of other men including Vuillard and Diaghilev, going so far as to quote a letter to her from the Russian impresario, where he defends himself from her charge of not loving her enough. ”Please remember that not very long ago we came to a very serious agreement on the question that you are the only woman on this earth that I could ever love.” See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., pp. 115- 116. To her credit, Misia is, at times, aware of her own self-indulgence, and briefly makes fun of herself before resuming the ego-centric narrative of her life story. As early as the mid-1890s, Lautrec caricatured her as a procuress presiding over her salon. The caricature was Lautrec’s revenge for Misia’s incessant complains about a large portrait of her which Lautrec was painting. “I made myself insufferable by complaining that my eyes were not big enough, that my nose was not small enough, that my neck was not long enough. In short, I so irritated him that once the picture was finished he took his revenge by making an incredible caricature of a dinner party at my house in which I was represented as a procuress.” See Misia and the Muses, p. 51.

65 Misia gives herself away by contrasting the Dreyfus affair with the enclosed world of art:

“We often went to the Emile Zolas, who lived in the rue Bruxelles. This was the time when the Dreyfus case, having poisoned all minds, was reaching its final paroxysm. “J’Accuse”, the brilliant open letter from the impetuous author of Nana, had burst like a thunder-clap upon a Paris given over to art and pleasure. . . . The comical part of it was that, as a human specimen, the little Jewish Captain for whom we were all ready to murder our parents represented everything we most disliked. . . . We gathered at Mirbeau’s, where, around the standard so fantastically unfurled by Zola, we made a lot of noise. . . . Of all my friends, only two succeeded in escaping the contagion by retreating into their ivory towers. One was Mallarmé . . . the other was Renoir, who took refuge in his painting.”

See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., p. 46. Even as she used the Dreyfus affair to play up her intimate friendship with the Zolas, Misia focused most of her account on the lavish dinner party given to celebrate Dreyfus upon his acquittal.

66 Misia and the Muses, op. cit., pp. 32-33.

67 Misia and the Muses, op. cit., pp. 35-36. Misia begins the next chapter of her memoirs by narrowing her little world even further. “The house at Valvins became a second branch of the Revue Blanche. But by now I had done some sorting out, and only invited those whom I really cared for.” (op. cit. p. 40) 68 One example is a paragraph on the Dreyfus affair. On p. 56, she mentions the trial of her anarchist friend, Félix Fénéon.

69 See Misia and the Muses, op. cit., p. 56. The same woman who could make such comments about the working class needing culture lamented the decision of the Paris Opera to abandon the most luxurious private boxes on the stage of the opera itself. Misia had one of these boxes which came with private rooms in back where bored visitors could hold conversations in the middle of performances. See Misia and the Muses, op. cit.,pp. 79-80.

“In those days I had one of those lovely boxes at the Opera that were situated on the stage itself. They were removed after the 1914-18 war . . . and they are a great loss, for nothing could have been lovelier or more decorative than those small balconies of red velvet, overhanging the stage to right and left. With women in evening dress leaning gracefully over the performance. . . . The Opera lost much of its charm when it did away with this pleasant accommodation.”

70 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 9

71 The following passages from Huysmans’ Against Nature are typical.

(from Chapter I)

Then, in the days when Des Esseintes still deemed it incumbent on him to play the eccentric, he had also installed strange and elaborate dispositions of furniture and fittings, partitioning off his salon into a series of niches, each differently hung and carpeted, and each harmonizing in a subtle likeness by a more or less vague similarity of tints, gay or sombre, refined or barbaric, with the special character of the Latin and French books he loved. He would then settle himself down to read in whichever of these recesses displayed in its scheme of decoration the closest correspondence with the intimate essence of the particular book his caprice of the moment led him to peruse.

. . . But these extravagances, that had once been his boast, had died a natural death; nowadays his only feeling was one of self-contempt to remember these puerile and out-of-date displays of eccentricity,--the extraordinary clothes he had donned and the grotesque decorations he had lavished on his house. His only thought henceforth was to arrange, for his personal gratification only and no longer in order to startle other people, a home that should be comfortable, yet at the same time rich and rare in its appointments, to contrive himself a peaceful and exquisitely organized abode, specially adapted to meet the exigencies of the solitary life he proposed to lead.

When at length the new house at Fontenay was ready and fitted up in accordance with his wishes and intentions by the architect he had engaged; when nothing else was left save to settle the scheme of furniture and decoration, once again he passed in review, carefully and methodically, the whole series of available tints.

What he wanted was colours the effect of which was confirmed and strengthened under artificial light; little he cared even if by daylight they should appear insipid or crude, for he lived practically his whole life at night, holding that then a man was more truly at home, more himself and his own master, and that the mind found its only real excitant and effective stimulation in contact with the shades of evening;

. . . [many colors considered but rejected as unsuitable] . . .

All these colours being rejected, three only were left, viz. red, orange, yellow. Of these three, he preferred orange, so confirming by his own example the truth of a theory he used to declare was almost mathematically exact in its correspondence with the reality, to wit: that a harmony is always to be found existing between the sensual constitution of any individual of a genuinely artistic temperament and whatever colour his eyes see in the most pronounced and vivid way.

In fact, if we leave out of account the common run of men whose coarse retinas perceive neither the proper cadence peculiar to each of the colours nor the subtle charm of their various modifications and shades; similarly leaving on one side those bourgeois eyes that are insensible to the pomp and splendour of the strong, vibrating colours; regarding therefore only persons of delicate, refined visual organs, well trained in appreciation by the lessons of literature and art, it appeared to him to be an undoubted fact that the eye of that man amongst them who has visions of the ideal, who demands illusions to satisfy his aspirations, who craves veils to hide the nakedness of reality, is generally soothed and satisfied by blue and its cognate tints, such as mauve, lilac, pearl-grey, provided always they remain tender and do not overpass the border where they lose their individuality and change into pure violets and unmixed greys.

The blustering, swaggering type of men, on the contrary, the plethoric, the sanguine, the stalwart go-ahead fellows who scorn compromises and by-roads to their goal, and rush straight at their object whatever it is, losing their heads at the first go-off, these for the most part delight in the startling tones of the reds and yellows, in the clash and clang of vermilions and chromes that blind their eyes and surfeit their senses.

Last comes the class of persons, of nervous organization and enfeebled vigour, whose sensual appetite craves highly seasoned dishes, men of a hectic, over-stimulated constitution. Their eyes almost invariably hanker after that most irritating and morbid of colours, with its artificial splendours and feverish acrid gleams,--orange.

These preliminaries disposed of, he made a point of eschewing, so far as possible, at any rate in his study, the use of Oriental stuffs and rugs, which in these days, when rich tradesmen can buy them in the fancy shops at a discount, have become so common and so much a mark of vulgar ostentation.

Eventually he made up his mind to have his walls bound like his books in large-grained crushed morocco, of the best Cape skins, surfaced by means of heavy steel plates under a powerful press.

The panelling once completed, he had the mouldings and tall plinths painted a deep indigo, a blue lacquer like what the coach-builders use for carriage bodies, while the ceiling, which was slightly coved, was also covered in morocco, displaying, like a magnified oeil-de-boeuf, framed in the orange leather, a circle of sky, as it were, of a rich blue, wherein soared silver angels, figures of seraphim embroidered long ago by the Weavers' Guild of Cologne for an ancient cope.

After the whole was arranged and finished, all these several tints fell into accord at night and did not clash at all; the blue of the woodwork struck a stable note that was pleasing and satisfying to the eye, supported and warmed, so to say, by the surrounding shades of orange, which for their part shone out with a pure, unsullied gorgeousness, itself backed up and in a way heightened by the near presence of the blue.

. . . The windows, the glass of which was coarse and semiopaque, bluish in tinge and with many of the panes filled with the bottoms of bottles, the protuberances picked out with gilt, allowed no view of the outside world and admitted only a faint dim "religious" light. They were further darkened by curtains made out of old priestly stoles, the dull dead gold of whose embroideries faded off into a background of a subdued, almost toneless red.

[from Chapter II]

. . . [Des Esseintes takes in a pair of married servants but arranges matters so he almost never sees or hears them]

More than this, as the woman must needs pass along the front of the house occasionally on her way to an outhouse where the wood was stored and he was resolved not to suffer the annoyance of seeing her commonplace exterior, he had a costume made for her of Flemish grogram, with a white mutch and a great black hood to muffle face and head, such as the Béguines still wear to this day at Ghent. The shadow of this mediaeval coif gliding by in the dusk gave him a conventual feeling, reminding him of those peaceful, pious settlements, those abodes of silence and solitude buried out of sight in a corner of the bustling, busy city.

[He designed a dining room shaped like a boat and decorated with shipping posters, timetables with lists of ports, maps and navigational instruments and fishing rods] . . .

By these means he could procure himself, without ever stirring from home, in a moment, almost instantaneously, all the sensations of a long voyage; the pleasure of moving from place to place, a pleasure which indeed hardly exists save as a matter of after recollection, almost never as a present enjoyment at the moment of the actual journey, this he could savour to the full at his ease, without fatigue or worry, in this improvised cabin, whose ordered disorder, whose transitional look and temporary arrangement, corresponded closely enough with the nature of the flying visits he paid it and the limited time he devoted to his meals, while it offered an absolute contrast to his working-room,--a fixed and final spot, a place of system and settled habit, a room manifestly contrived for the definite enjoyment of a life of cloistered and learned leisure. In fact it appeared to him a futile waste of energy to travel when, so he believed, imagination was perfectly competent to fill the place of the vulgar reality of actual prosaic facts. To his mind it was quite possible to satisfy all the cravings commonly supposed to be the hardest to content under the normal conditions of life, and this merely by a trifling subterfuge, by a more or less close simulation of the object aimed at by these desires. . . .

The whole secret is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate the mind on a single point, to attain to a sufficient degree of self-abstraction to produce the necessary hallucination and so substitute the vision of the reality for the reality itself. To tell the truth, artifice was in Des Esseintes' philosophy the distinctive mark of human genius.

As he used to say, Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!

. . .

Yes, there is no denying it, she is in her dotage and has long ago exhausted the simple-minded admiration of the true artist; the time is undoubtedly come when her productions must be superseded by art.

. . .

Thoughts like these would come to Des Esseintes at times when the breeze carried to his ears the far-off whistle of the baby railroad that plies shuttlewise backwards and forwards between Paris and Sceaux. His house was within a twenty minutes' walk or so of the station of Fontenay, but the height at which it stood and its isolated situation left it entirely unaffected by the noise and turmoil of the vile hordes that are inevitably attracted on Sundays by the neighbourhood of a railway station.

. . . During the last months of his residence in Paris, at the period when, utterly disillusioned, depressed by hypochondria, eaten up by spleen, he had reached such a pitch of nervous irritability that the mere sight of an unpleasant object or disagreeable person was deeply graven on his brain and several days were needed to efface the impress, even to a slight degree, of the human form that had formed one of his most agonizing torments when passed casually in the street.

In positive fact, he suffered pain at the sight of certain types of face, resented almost as insults the condescending or crabbed expressions of particular visages, and felt himself sorely tempted to box the ears of such and such a worthy citizen who strolled by with half closed lids and a magisterial air, another who stood swinging his cane and admiring himself in the shop windows, or yet another who seemed to be pondering the fate of the universe, as he absorbed with frowning brows the titbits and gossipy paragraphs of his morning paper.

He scented such a depth of stupidity, such a lively hatred of all his own ideals, such a contempt for literature and art and everything he himself adored, implanted and profoundly fixed in the meagre brains of these tradesmen preoccupied to the exclusion of all else by schemes of swindling and money-grubbing and only accessible to the ignoble distraction that alone appeals to mean minds, politics, that he would rush back home in a fury and lock himself up with his books.

Worst of all, he loathed with all his powers of hate the new types of self-made men, the hideous boors who feel themselves bound to talk loud and laugh uproariously in restaurants and cafés, who elbow you, without apology, on the pavements, who, without a word of polite excuse or so much as a bow, drive the wheels of a child's go-cart between your legs.

. . .

[from Chapter 5]

. . . Having once divorced himself from contemporary existence, he was resolved to suffer in his hermit's cell no spectres of old repugnances and bygone dislikes; accordingly he had chosen only to possess pictures of a subtle, exquisite refinement, instinct with dreams of Antiquity, reminiscent it may be of antique corruption, but at any rate remote from our modern times and modern manners.

He had selected for the diversion of his mind and the delight of his eyes works of a suggestive charm, introducing him to an unfamiliar world, revealing to him traces of new possibilities, stirring the nervous system by erudite phantasies, complicated dreams of horror, visions of careless wickedness and cruelty.

Of all others there was one artist who most ravished him with unceasing transports of pleasure,--Gustave Moreau. . . . [here follows a long passage on two images of Salome by Moreau]

[discusses the decoration of the other rooms in the house, including the bedroom]

In the other case,--and now that he was determined to break with the agitating memories of his past life, this was the only one possible,--he must contrive a bed-chamber to resemble a monk's cell in a Religious House; but here came difficulty upon difficulty, for he refused absolutely to endure for his personal occupation the austere ugliness that marks such refuges for penitence and prayer.

. . .

In bed in the morning, as he lay with his head on the pillow before falling asleep, he would gaze at his Théocopuli [El Greco], the painful colouring of which modified to some degree the soft cheerfulness of the yellow silk on the walls and gave it a graver tone; at these times, he could easily picture himself living a hundred leagues from Paris, far from the world of men, in the depths of a Monastery.

And, after all, the illusion was not difficult to sustain for truly he was living a life largely analogous to that of a Monk. In this way, he enjoyed the advantages of confinement in a cloister, while he escaped its inconveniences,--the quasi- military discipline, the lack of comfort, the dirt and herding together and the monotonous idleness. Just as he had made his cell into a warm, luxurious bedchamber, so he had procured himself an existence carried on under normal conditions, without hardship or incommodity, sufficiently occupied, yet free from irksome restraints.

Like an eremite, he was ripe for solitude, harassed by life's stress, expecting nothing more of existence; like a monk again, he was overwhelmed with an immense fatigue, a craving for peace and quiet, a longing to have nothing more to do henceforth with the vulgar, who were in his eyes all utilitarians and fools.

In short, though he was conscious of no vocation for the state of grace, he felt in himself a genuine sympathy for the folks shut up in Monasteries, persecuted by a society that hates them and can never forgive the well-grounded contempt they entertain for it . . .

72 Even leading proponents of Aestheticism like Wilde offered telling critiques of its narcissistic extremes in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

73 William Hazlitt offered a typical example of this thinking in his Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England, London, 1824, pp. 2-6.

“The eye is not caught by glitter and varnish; we see the pictures by their own internal light. This is not a bazaar, a raree-show of art, a Noah’s ark of all the Schools marching out in endless procession; but a sanctuary, a holy of holies, collected by taste … [A visit] is like going on a pilgrimage – it is an act of devotion performed at the shrine of Art! It is a cure (for the time at least) for low-thoughted cares and uneasy passions. We are transported to another sphere … We breath empyrean air; we enter into the minds of Raphael, of Titian, of Poussin, of the Carracci, and look at nature with their eyes; we live in times past, and seem identified with the permanent forms of things. The business of the world at large, and of its pleasures, appear like a vanity and an impertinence. What signify the hubbub, the shifting scenery, . . . the folly, the idle fashions without, when compared to the solitude, the silence, the speaking looks, the unfading forms within? Here is the mind’s true home. The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.”

This text is cited in Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, Routledge, 1995, p. 15

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