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Game of Checkers

Checkers Artist Jean Édouard Vuillard

• French Post Impressionist painter and printmaker influenced by Seurat and Gauguin.
  
  
• Most gifted member of Les Nabis.
  
  
• Spent his youth at Cuiseaux Saône-et-Loire; in 1878 his family moved to Paris and after his father's death in 1884, Vuillard received a scholarship to continue his education at the Lycée Condorcet, where he met several writers, musicians and future painter, Ker Xavier Roussel, who would later become his best friend.
  
  
• Vuillard followed Roussel's advice to refuse a military career and entered the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met Pierre Bonnard.
  
  
• After a year at Condorcet, Vuillard and Roussel left the school to join the studio of painter Diogene Maillart and under his tutelage received the rudiments of artistic training.
  
  
• Three years later, in 1888, Vuillard joined Les Nabis and the following year Vuillard began to work at the Académie Julian, where he met Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson and Paul Sérusier and eventually shared a studio with Pierre and Maurice.
  
  
• When Vuillard’s work was rejected by the Salon of 1890, he never submitted anything again for consideration in official art circles.
  
  
• He contributed his art to the Nabis exhibitions at the Gallery of Le Barc de Boutteville from 1891 to 1896.
  
  
• Vuillard also worked for the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre of Lugné-Poë designing sets and programs.
  
  
• His best pictures were inspired by the daily activity around him, and these domestic scenes, though small in scale, were intimate in effect and held a mysterious, ritualistic character.
  
  
• Vuillard's early period also includes the influential set of colour lithographs, Paysages et Intérieurs, produced in 1899.
  
  
• Jean-Édouard’s early canvases depicted a delicacy and daring of spirit and reflected the influence of Gauguin’s flat planes and emphatic contours as well as the colour mosaic and geometric surface organization of Seurat.
  
  
• The motif in ‘La Partie de Dames’ or The Checkers Game, a gouache on paper, displayed the congenial mood and atmosphere of a group of 3 women reading and talking and an amiable checkers game being played in a courtyard setting by two men with a spectator as viewed from a balcony window; the colour mosaic in browns and greys gave dimension and depth to the composition and the splotches of colour created detail and some definition in the checkers players.
  
  
• It was on this flat surface that Vuillard transformed ordinary activities into evocative and expressive arrangements as can be seen in his 1897/8 colour lithograph on china paper of a ‘Game of Checkers’; the simple interior was created with a great sense of light and the theme was expressed in an arrangement of basic tones.
  
  
• In ‘Mother and Sister of the Artist’ and ‘Dressmaker's Studio’, both works struck a rare balance between spontaneity and studied structure in the delicate handling of colour harmony and textures.
  
  
• Vuillard’s genre scenes represented in both his paintings and lithographies focused the simplicity and intimacy within a scene rather than detailed portraits of people.
  
  
• After the turn of the century, Vuillard's art lost much of its originality and force in favour of a more conservative approach
  
  
• Vuillard first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants of 1901 and at the Salon d’Automne in 1903 and began to work on a series of decorations or ‘apartment frescoes’.
  
  
• In his paintings and decorative pieces, Vuillard depicted mostly interiors, streets and garden settings that were touched by a gentle humour and artistically executed in the delicate range on soft, blurred colors characteristic of his art.
  
  
• The artist never married and lived an uneventful life with his mother until the age of sixty, so he was very familiar with interior and domestic spaces; a lot of Vuillard’s art reflected this influence, as it was largely decorative and often depicted very intricate patterns within the scenes.
  
  
• In 1937, Édouard designed decorations for the Palais de Chaillot and the following year for the League of Nations Palace, Geneva.
  
  
• Then in 1938, he held a large retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts.
  
  
• Vuillard experimented more and more with abstraction and powerful colour in a manner that later resembled the manner of Henri Matisse and the Fauves.
  
  
• In the latter decades of his life, he expanded his range in natural light, landscape and portraiture.
  
  
• Jean Édouard Vuillard died at La Baule two years later on June 21, 1940.

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