Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) was born in Cuiseaux in eastern France on 11 November 1868. His father, a retired officer, died when he was fifteen, and his mother was a seamstress; the family moved to Paris in 1877. He studied at the Académie Julian and at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1889 joined a group of young painters who called themselves the Nabis, the “prophets”: Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and Ker-Xavier Roussel among them. They took their inspiration from Gauguin and from Japanese woodblock prints, used colour symbolically rather than naturalistically, and kept the surface of the canvas flat.
Vuillard became the master of the intimate interior, which is why he and Bonnard are also called Intimists. His pictures show crowded rooms, patterned wallpapers and dresses, women sewing and children at play, all merging into one quiet, softly coloured surface. Like the other Nabis he treated decorative work as equal to easel painting, and made large decorative panels, illustrations for La Revue Blanche, and sets and programmes for Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre, which he helped found in 1893.
After the Nabis disbanded around 1900, his style grew more naturalistic and he became a sought-after portraitist and decorator. In his last years he received large public commissions for the Palais de Chaillot in 1936 and the League of Nations in Geneva in 1937. He left Paris in June 1940 as German troops advanced, and died a few days later at La Baule on 21 June 1940, aged seventy-one.