Sunday

This is a detail from Aux Clayes - Geranium sur une table bleue by Édouard Vuillard, 1932. I really love paintings of domestic interiors and Vuillard’s are particularly wonderful.

He captures every detail of easeful family life: women sewing (often his mother, who was a seamstress), chatting, laying the table, eating, sitting about after lunch. Women arranging their hair, or flowers, or wrangling small children, or reading contentedly. He paints pears, oysters, stacks of dishes, cutlery, coffee cups and mandarins. He paints jugs of flowers, greengages, glassware, orange peel and candlesticks. He paints exuberant rural gardens and benches in city squares (doesn’t that painting make you want to get the train to Paris right after breakfast?).

When the work features people, the focus of his painting is almost always on what’s going on in the background - fabrics, textures, objects, flowers, light, leaves, patterns. Even when society women start lining up to be painted by him, the portraits teem with rugs, wallpaper, artworks, textiles, books and lamps.

In his youth and until 1900 Vuillard was part of an artists’ group called Les Nabis, who believed, among other things, that all art forms were equally valuable. During this time he started producing stage sets for the theatre, drew programmes and made murals, screens and backdrops (including for the first ever staging of Ubu Roi). He continued this work throughout his life.

Interestingly he also at one point came quite close to interior design. You only have to glance at his masterly understanding of colour and pattern in a domestic setting to see why. He properly understood rooms.

I chose this painting because it is finally summer, both here, now, today and on the canvas, one morning in the French countryside in 1932.

These short fortnightly image posts are free to read. They alternate with my food posts, which are also free. For everything else, you need a paid subscription. Thank you for reading, have a fantastic Sunday, and if you enjoyed this post do please really kindly hit the ❤️ button. Thank you! Stay hydrated, it’s going to be hot.

PS I think by now everyone’s probably aware of Diesel, the donkey who thinks he’s an elk and is living his absolutely best life, but if not, here he is. I guarantee he will enhance your day 🫎🤝🫏.