Édouard Vuillard
This beautiful painting is on display in Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York. Enjoy :)
This likeness captures the intense fervor of the artist's friend and patron, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poë (1869-1940). Lugné-Poë was an actor and daring theatrical producer who helped Vuillard obtain his first commission for a theatrical poster. The artist's use of flat color to define form and volume in this intimate portrait is typical of the Nabis painters, a group of artists influenced by Paul Gauguin and with whom Vuillard was aligned. Vuillard was one of the key Nabis painters - a small group of late nineteenth century Paris artists known for their intimate subjects and new approaches to colour and composition. Vuillard and Poe were close friends and this small portrait was perhaps painted in a small studio that they shared in Montmartre. Lugné-Poë is captured writing and his jet-black hair dramatically juxtaposed against the neutral background immediately fixes our attention upon the subject. Lugné-Poë was a man of the theatre: a director and an actor who was first to employ avant garde actors and theatre design. Intensity is conveyed through the positioning of the figure at the very front of the work and through such details as a concentrated gaze and a writer's tightly pressed fingers. The electric line that moves across the figure underscores this intensity even further; these energetic lines of light falling off the jacket add to the portrait a sense that is both intimate and intense, solitary yet vital.