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Vuillard's Unlikely Obsession: Revisiting Place Vintimille - French artist Edouard Vuillard's works record Paris

Best known for intimate interiors and portraits, Edouard Vuillard painted scores of views and took an untold number of photographs of the Montmartre square where he lived. In the process, he captured a sense of what changed and what remained as Paris became a 20th-century city.

When Edouard Vuillard and his mother moved to Place Vintimille (now Place Adolphe Max) in Paris in 1908, he came upon a motif that would fascinate him for the next 20 years. Their new apartment offered a direct view of Place Vintimille's small interior park, whose tall chestnut trees, benches and lawns offered then, as now, an oasis of calm amid the noise of Montmartre. Between 1909 and 1928 Vuillard painted some 60 views of the park at different times of day and year and under different atmospheric and climatic conditions. The series comprises seven large decorative panels, six large studies, one five-panel screen, 15 additional paintings and some 30 pastels.(1) Vuillard's preoccupation with this small park and its seasonal changes is unprecedented in his oeuvre.

This protracted fascination invites comparison with other artists' obsessions with a single motif, such as Hokusai's with Mount Fuji, Cezanne's with Mont Ste.-Victoire and, perhaps more to the point, Monet's with his lily pond. Monet painted some 65 views of the pond in his garden at Giverny between 1900 and 1919. It may be significant that Vuillard, who started his Place Vintimille series during the winter of 1909-10, visited Monet in Giverny in December 1909. Filled with admiration for the master after this visit, he began to note changes of climatic conditions and effects in his diary.(2) Vuillard's enchantment with his own above-ground "pond"--in some of the views, he made the park's oval shape look like an overgrown pool--inspired him to take photographs of the scene from his windows. These photos later served as aides-memoires for the large decorative panels.

Before the Vuillards moved to Place Vintimille, they had lived in eight different apartments in Paris over 30 years. These frequent changes of address might have been related to Madame Vuillard's corset-making business, which she operated from the various residences until her retirement in 1898. The move to Place Vintimille inaugurated a period of stability--Vuillard had by then become an established artist who supported his mother--and for the next 32 years, nearly half his life, Vuillard remained on this square. During the first 19 of those years, he and his mother lived at 26, rue de Calais, on the corner of Place Vintimille, with a panoramic view over the park. In 1927 they moved 50 yards away to 6, Place Vintimille--with a narrower, more restricted view of the park--where Vuillard remained until shortly before his death in 1940.

The modest apartments that Vuillard had earlier shared with his mother and sisters had served as settings for the artist's small, poetic and dimly lit intimiste interiors of the 1890s, which are his best-known works. He often depicted his widowed mother (and lifelong muse) at work with her assistants, unrolling bolts of material, and cutting and sewing amid a profusion of subtly hued patterned wallpapers, screens, curtains, tablecloths and clothing.

The artist's closest Nabi confreres, Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Aurelian Lugnee-Poe, frequently stopped by, and he painted them as they lingered after a meal. The Nabis' anti-Impressionist, anti-naturalist and mystical leanings were inspired by Gauguin's belief that the artist should not copy nature but rather--through simplifications, vivid colors and arabesque lines--produce art that is personal, poetic and emotional. Although the fiat, decorative patterns in Vuillard's work display a kinship with those of his Nabi colleagues, Vuillard and his friend Bonnard remained aloof from the group's endless theoretical discussions. While the Nabis intended their art to transcend daily life, Vuillard and Bonnard remained deeply rooted in the everyday. In the series of pastels of Place Vintimille, for example, more abstract preoccupations were superseded by concerns with effects of light and atmosphere. Likewise, the cast of characters in the park embraces elegantly sinuous ladies, flaneurs, children at play, nannies, grannies and stout construction workers, the last having no counterparts elsewhere in Vuillard's painting.

Place Vintimille is a forgotten corner of "Le Vieux Paris" that lies just around the corner from the boulevard Clichy and the rue de Clichy. The square has a colorful past. During the 18th century the chateau La Folie-Bouiexiere and its vast park occupied the neighborhood. The property changed hands and names often during the following decades and, in 1841, was parceled off into individual plots. One of these became the Place Vintimille--named after a former owner, Marie-Francoise Celestine de Vintimille--together with some lengths of street. Toward the close of the 19th century, a 7-foot statue of the nude Napoleon that towered over the small park was replaced by one of Hector Berlioz.(3) The composer had lived in this neighborhood, at 4, rue de Calais, from 1857 until his death in 1869, and the small park was named in his honor. In 1940, the year of Vuillard's death, Place Vintimille became Place Adolphe Max, after a former mayor of Brussels who was an honorary citizen of Paris.(4)

Vuillard had used the motif of women and children at leisure in public parks since the early 1890s, when he created the magnificent large panel The Park (1893-94), a nearly life-size depiction of strollers, nursemaids and youngsters.(5) The panel was a commission from his friend Thadee Natanson, the publisher of La Revue Blanche (1891-1903), and Natanson's bride, Misia.(6) In Place Vintimille, another commission, this time for the flamboyant playwright Henry Bernstein, Vuillard first depicted the locale on a large scale.(7) Working on the Bernstein panels during the winter of 1909-10, Vuillard chose the view from his new fourth-floor apartment on Place Vintimille.(8)

Three of the vertical panels show the park, while a fourth shows a view of the rue de Calais leading away from the park. These strikingly decorative views (they combine the picturesque with gentle humor in an overall surface unity of color and design) capture different segments of the elliptical park. Despite the wintry season and the mostly leaden sky, all the benches are occupied. We glimpse hatted ladies, aproned maids, babies in prams, children and dogs. Above and beyond the bare trees rise the faded facades of houses dating from about 1850. Although the three panels at first seem to form a triptych (with the two flanking panels each 8 inches wider than the central one) the horizon lines differ in all three, forms overlap and lines are discontinuous. The light and weather conditions differ also, ranging from sun with clouds on the left to overcast and cloudy on the right. In same-sized oil studies for the two outer panels--Vuillard made none for the narrower central one--the wintry park is deserted and the benches are empty.(9)

Vuillard took many photographs of Place Vintimille, from his fourth-floor windows beginning in 1909 and, after he moved in 1913, from the second floor of the same building. Because none of these photos is dated, only the different viewpoints indicate the approximate dates. Among the photos are two that have distinct affinities with the Bernstein panels. The pair match the compositions of the left and right panels in the trio, and it is likely that Vuillard used the photographs as aides-memoires. He was no stranger to the camera: in 1895 he began to use a simple Kodak camera to take snapshots of friends and family to serve in preparing his small interior paintings.(10)

When photographing the outdoor motif from the fourth floor, Vuillard had to contend with certain technical limitations. His lens could not encompass all the elements from the sky down to the sidewalk that he included in the paintings. Wide-angle lenses were not yet available, so he could photograph the entire width of the park only segment by segment. The width, though not the height, of each painted panel corresponds to the camera's narrow range.

Vuillard used the medium of distemper, or peinture a la colle, for these works, a technique he had initiated in 1893-94 with The Park and, though somewhat modified, in his theater backdrops of the same time. Instead of binding pigments with oil, Vuillard combined them with hot glue and water. He boiled the glue and water for many hours, then mixed the powdered pigments with this liquid, keeping the solution warm to prevent thickening. The fast-drying distemper required quick application and, for areas of correction, a reworking with newly mixed colors. Although this method was time-consuming and difficult, Vuillard liked the resultant matte and crusty surface that evoked painting on stone.(11)

The true fascination with Place Vintimille intensified once Vuillard completed the four Bernstein panels. In 1910 he created some 20 works focusing solely on the park. These works, some in oil but most in pastel and in a range of sizes, have the spontaneous, quick brushstrokes that characterize studies. They depict different spots in and outside the small park, during the day and at night, deserted in snow, wet after rain and colorful with autumn leaves. The current locations of many of these studies, most of which are unpublished, are unknown.

The following year, Vuillard created the magnificent five-panel screen Place Vintimille (1911) for the young American expatriate Marguerite Chapin. It shows Place Vintimille from an exhilarating bird's-eye view. The vertiginous perspective eliminates the horizon line and the buildings across the park, and the green oval of the leafy park has the aspect of the lily pond at Giverny. For the unfolded screen to show the entire square, Vuillard created a broader perspective than is possible in any single view from this height. In this instance, the plunging scene corresponds neatly to the two photographs which he had taken earlier from the fourth-floor window. The photograph of the left side of Place Vintimille and the two left panels of the screen match seamlessly, showing the same foreground lamppost, three similarly spaced sidewalk trees and the awnings over the shop fronts of the rue de Bruxelles in the far background. Vuillard's photograph of the right side extends back to the rue de Douai, though the screen's three right panels do not.

The foliage, indicating late spring or early summer, ranges from the freshest yellow-green to brownish, reddish and deeper greens, as in the flowering chestnut trees on the left. Seen from high above, these lush trees allow only glimpses, of the park below:, a patch of lawn, some strollers and a partial view of the Berlioz statue. Smaller trees cast mauve shadows on the curved sidewalk. Among the many gentle vignettes woven into the moment, though not visible at first glance, two might be mentioned. Both take place next to the tree in the center foreground: the schoolboy who kneels to check the air pressure in the front wheel of his bicycle and, partly covered by the trunk of the same tree, the clochard who rests on the sidewalk along the park's curved fence.

Exceptional among Vuillard's representations of the park, Place Vintimille, Paris (1916) presents a panoramic view of the entire square and its sidewalk in a single canvas. From his diary we know that Vuillard began this work in the summer of 1915. Emile Levy, a printer and friend of the artist, had commissioned it for his office. Two years earlier, when his apartment on the fourth floor and an adjacent one were combined into one unit, Vuillard had moved down to the second floor. Accordingly, the viewpoint represented in the 1916 canvas is lower and closer to the park. The luxurious expanse of the entire park, however, could not be captured from the artist's second-floor vantage point. This is demonstrated by one of Vuillard's photographs of 1915, taken while construction work was going on just outside the park. The elements shown in Vuillard's photograph match those in the right-hand side of Place Vintimille, Paris, except that the artist has added five more workers and their equipment to the painting. He even copied from the photograph the round water tank on the horse-drawn buggy at the far right of the painting.(12) We can assume that the artist also made a photograph of the left side of the park and sidewalk.

The construction visible in Place Vintimille, Paris is related to the building of a large underground storage area where municipal workers keep tools and equipment for park maintenance. Still used today, it is accessible by a few steep steps located where the tool shed stands at the left in the painting. The opened sidewalk on the right has been neatly divided into sections. Four men toil on their knees, overseen by a supervisor. In the center, buckets, carts, rubble and pieces of wood pile up helter-skelter. Ever the truthful observer of people's singular gestures and ways, Vuillard includes the workers' cast-off jackets flung over fences. As before, the sun-dappled park is a refuge for the neighborhood's young and old. Most vividly among the artist's many depictions of Place Vintimille, this painting brings the viewer into immediate contact with the sights and sounds of a typical Parisian summer day.

In the years that followed, between 1916 and 1924, Vuillard created another dozen paintings and pastels of Place Vintimille. Some retain the prospect from his second-floor window, others capture views of the park from within, with women pensively walking or sitting on benches alone or in chatty clusters. Two small paintings show posters stuck on boards mounted along the fence for an upcoming local election, a practice that remains unchanged today.

In 1927 Vuillard and his mother moved just 50 yards away, to 6, Place Vintimille. This change has always been explained as the consequence of construction work on the second floor of their apartment house. In fact, not just the Vuillards but all the tenants had to evacuate the building, because it was to be demolished along with the building next door. In their place rose the five-story headquarters of the Gaz de France in 1930. The utility company still occupies the premises.

From the window of his new third-floor apartment at number 6, Vuillard closely followed the systematic demolition of his former residence. He chronicled the disappearance of his own apartment, wall by wall, in four striking photographs and three pastels of 1928. All record the garish posters that clung to the ruined stump of the building, bringing clutter along with clamor to this once-sedate square.

These upheavals left their mark on the artist's tranquil existence. During the turbulent year of 1928, he created just four pastels of the park. With feverish strokes they show the site during early morning and at night, now seen from the unfamiliar and more confining viewpoint of 6, Place Vintimille. In December, his mother died.

Vuillard remained at number 6 for another 12 years. His apartment faced one of the park's two narrow ends and no longer offered the broad, panoramic view he loved. During that period, he did not create a single painting of the park, though in 1935 he did create an etching of Place Vintimille which was reissued in 1944, in an edition of 155, bearing the inscription "Pour les Amis de Vuillard."(13)

Did the diminished perspective onto the park contribute to the waning of his fascination? The construction of the Gaz de France building, and with it the daily arrival of hordes of office workers, might have spoiled his sense of proprietorship of the park. And, since painting Place Vintimille was linked to life with his mother on that square, the motif might have assumed a different meaning after her death. We will never know. A recent visit by this writer confirmed, however, that Place Vintimille has suffered only small changes since Vuillard's death. The bronze statue of Berlioz has been replaced by one in stone, and the pedestal has been lowered.

Vuillard continued to paint portraits and interiors, the mainstays of his oeuvre, throughout his life, but portraying Place Vintimille may have lent a certain Proustian quality to his existence, mingling art and life, present and past. The very constancy and availability of the motif just outside his window may also have enticed him to use it as a foil for experimentation, allowing him to shift from the mostly decorative concerns of the early large panels to the explorations of light, atmosphere and color of the pastels and oils. In any case, he made the place his own. Just three years after the artist's death, the poet Paul Morand mused, "I cannot pass under the chestnut trees of Place Vintimille, which Vuillard painted so often from his apartment high up on the corner of rue de Calais, without thinking that I am at the crossroad of time, at a revolving stage of Parisian sensibility and French art."(14)

(1.) For this information, facts about unpublished works, access to photographs and more, I am grateful to Guy Cogeval and his assistant, Matthias Chivot, who are preparing the catalogue raisonne of Edouard Vuillard under the direction of Antoine Salomon. Jacques Dazzi and Guillaume Poitrinal also furnished essential facts about Place Vintimille. Further thanks go to Jean-Marie Lo-Pinto, Nadine Gensollent and Jean-Pierre Meunier of Gaz de France for allowing me to photograph Place Vintimille from their second- and fourth-floor offices.

(2.) See Gloria Groom, Edouard Vuillard: Painter Decorator: Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 175.

(3.) The bronze statue of the composer by Alfred Lenoir, erected in 1895, shows a pensive and aged Berlioz. It was replaced in 1946 by Georges Saupique's stone statue, which shows a younger and more romantic-looking composer.

(4.) The toponymic information is taken from Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1963, pp. 66-67.

(5.) Other early depictions of this theme are Nursemaids and Children in a Public Park and A Game of Shuttlecock, two of a series of six horizontal decorative panels that the wealthy industrialist Paul Boutheroue Desmarais commissioned from the artist in 1892. In 1894, Vuillard created "The Public Garden," a suite of nine monumental panels for Alexandre Natanson, a financier and the brother of his friend Thadee Natanson. While no specific park had served as either the inspiration or setting for the earlier works, "The Public Garden" incorporates amalgams of several public gardens, among them the Tuileries, in whose neighborhood Vuillard had lived during the 1890s. See Groom, pp. 19ff. and 47ff.

(6.) When Thadee Natanson's collection was sold in 1908, Felix Feneon, critic and then-director of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, praised this work in his catalogue description, seeing in it the inspiration for all later depictions of public parks by the artist. Ibid., p. 44.

(7.) Bernstein had already acquired four large panels by Vuillard, collectively titled "Rue de Paris," from the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1908. Their individual titles are The Water Cart, The Eiffel Tower, The Street and Child Playing in the Gutter. From an unusually low perspective, they depict four streets in Passy, where Vuillard had lived just prior to his 1908 move to Place Vintimille.

(8.) The fourth floor in France is equivalent to the fifth floor in the United States.

(9.) These two preparatory panels are in a private collection in Germany. The three nearly full-scale pastel studies for the three coordinated Place Vintimille panels of ca. 1909-10 are in a private collection in Dallas. See Groom, p. 174.

(10.) Vuillard appears to have taken some 1,600 photographs; they remain in his family's collection and will be published shortly. After 1907 he made almost daily references to photography in his journal. See Elizabeth Wynne Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, exh. cat., Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, 1990, p. 111.

(11.) See Groom, p. 44, for detailed information about this process.

(12.) A preparatory study (La Place Vintimille a Paris, 1915, Metz, Musee de la Cour d'Or), in distemper on paper mounted on canvas, measures 63 by 90 1/2 inches, or 2 1/2 times larger than the painting itself. The study is virtually identical to the painting, though forms are generalized, and there is an absence of sunlight and figures, except for the bulky outline of a worker in the foreground (just as in the artist's photograph).

(13.) The etching is illustrated in Claude Roger-Marx, Vuillard: His Life and Work, trans. Edmund B. d'Auvergne, London, Paul Elek, 1946, p. 195.

(14.) See Groom, p. 240, note 64, which cites Paul Morand, Propos de 52 semaines, Geneva, Editions du Milieu du Monde, 1943, p. 113. This author's translation.

"Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, 1890-1930" debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago [Feb. 14-May 13]. It is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [June 26-Sept. 9].

Author: Sabine Rewald is an associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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