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Two pale-skinned women are shown from the waist up behind a counter in an interior space in this nearly square painting. Loosely painted patterns on their clothing, bunches of flowers to our right, and the background to our left create a patchwork of claret red, ivory white, forest green, deep burgundy, and golden yellow. The woman standing closer to us takes up the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile. Her features are painted with blended strokes so are indistinct. Her auburn hair is pulled up, and her high-collared, garnet-red and white striped shirt has long sleeves with puffy shoulders. She looks down at a red vase of flowers she holds at its base with the hand we see. The second woman stands at the first woman’s far shoulder. She turns her face slightly toward us, and also gazes down at the flowers on the counter. Her high-necked shirt is ruby red. Four wine-red vases in front of the women are filled with dark maroon-red or cream-white flowers, perhaps chrysanthemums, forest-green and tan greenery, and one vivid, tomato-red blossom. A gap between two vases could be another vase either patterned with white and celestial blue or reflecting those colors. A dark red and two white blossoms are in the lower left corner of the composition, next to a long, lidded box with light brown sides and a navy-blue top. A loosely painted form in the upper left corner, over the first woman’s shoulder, could be a figurine or another person. Though the details are vague, there is a suggestion of a face turned leftward. She has blond hair and wears a long, loose marigold-yellow garment. The right arm, to our left, could be raised to shoulder height, and she stands before a crimson background, maybe a curtain. The rest of the background is painted with dots and touches of apple red, maroon, orange, sage green, dark brown, and butter yellow. The artist signed the canvas near the lower right corner, “E. Vuillard.”

Edouard Vuillard

Woman in a Striped Dress, 1895

East Building, Ground Level — Gallery 103-C

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 65.7 x 58.7 cm (25 7/8 x 23 1/8 in.)

framed: 88.3 x 84 x 8.9 cm (34 3/4 x 33 1/16 x 3 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Accession Number

1983.1.38

Artists / Makers

Edouard Vuillard (artist) French, 1868 - 1940

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Overview

Vuillard belonged to a quasi-mystical group of young artists that arose in about 1890 and called themselves the Nabi, a Hebrew word for prophet. The Nabi rejected impressionism and considered simple transcription of the appearance of the natural world unthinking and unartistic. Inspired by Gauguin's work and symbolist poetry, their paintings evoke rather than specify, suggest rather than describe. Recognizing that the physical components of painting -- colored pigments arranged on a flat surface -- were artificial, they considered as false the traditional convention of regarding paintings as re-creations of the natural world.

Woman in a Striped Dress is one of five decorations Vuillard painted in 1895 for Thadée Natanson, publisher of the avant-garde journal La Revue Blanche, and his wife Misia Godebska, an accomplished pianist. The five, which differ in size and orientation, are intimate, self contained interiors, Vuillard's principal subject. All display rich harmonies in a restricted range of color and densely arranged in intricate patterns. The introspective woman arranging flowers here perhaps represents the red-haired Misia, whom Vuillard admired greatly. Vuillard adopted the symbolist idea of synesthesia, whereby one sense can evoke another, and in Woman in a Striped Dress the sumptuous visual qualities of Vuillard's reds may suggest the lush chords of music that Misia performed.

Inscription

lower right: E. Vuillard

Provenance

Commissioned 1895 by Thaddée Natanson, Paris; (Natanson sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 12 June 1908, no. 55); purchased by M. Escher. Georg Herbert Dietze, Frankfurt, by 1964; sold 1966 to (Wildenstein & Co., London, New York, and Paris);[1] by whom sold October 1966 to Mr. Paul Mellon, Upperville, VA; gift 1983 to NGA.

[1]Lent by Dietze to 1964 exhibition in Frankfurt. Date and source of Wildenstein acquisition according to a letter dated 14 December 1998, in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Dietze, George Herbert
Drouot, Hôtel
Escher, M.
Mellon, Paul
Natanson, Thaddée
Wildenstein & Co., Inc.

Exhibition History

1964: Vuillard, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1964. no. 26, repro.

1986: Gifts to the Nation: Selected Acquisitions from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986, unnumbered checklist, repro.

1986: Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad; State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 1986, no. 5, repro.

1989: The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Phillips Collection, Washington; The Brooklyn Museum, 1989-1990, no. 87, repro.

1992: From El Greco to Cézanne: Masterpieces of European Painting from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York, National Gallery of Greece, Athens, 1992-1993, no. 70, repro.

1993: Nabis 1888-1900, Kunsthaus, Zurich; Grand Palais, Paris; Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1993-1994, no. 172, repro.

2001: Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930, Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001, no. 39, repro.

2003: Edouard Vuillard, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2003-2004, no. 126, repro., as The Striped Blouse.

2004: The Origins of L'Art Nouveau: The Bing Empire, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; CaixaForum, Barcelona; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 2004-2006, unnumbered catalogue, fig. 128 (shown only in Amsterdam and Munich).

2012: Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, The Jewis Museum, New York, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2014: Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky, Kunsthaus Zürich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, 2014-2015, no. 206, pl. 152.

2019: Les Nabis et le décor: Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis…, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 2019, no. 21, repro.

Bibliography

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 433, repro.

1991: Kopper, Philip. America's National Gallery of Art: A Gift to the Nation. New York, 1991: 277, 283, color repro.

1992: National Gallery of Art, Washington. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 204, repro.

2003: Salomon, Antoine, and Guy Cogeval. Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance: Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels. 3 vols. Milan and Paris, 2003: 1:no. V-96.1, repro., as Woman in a Striped Blouse.