Place Vintimille by Edouard Vuillard

Anonymous photographer, The Glass Court of the Palais des Etudes, École des Beaux-Arts, 1884, albumen print on paper, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts

In 1888 Vuillard studied briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme, but disliked the conservative approach. Later that year he moved to the Académie Julian, where he met other young artists who rejected both academic art and impressionism. Vuillard associated with this group, known as the Nabis. He first made small expressive paintings of interiors using flats bands of color, then began adding detailed surface patterns to his work, creating enchanting paintings of women in domestic interiors. By the turn of the century he was making striking, large-scale decorative wall paintings and folding screens, and later, portraits of prosperous French families. While Vuillard's art remained figurative, his intense focus on the picture surface itself—the flattened, sometimes unpainted support patterned with figures that blended with their surroundings—would foreshadow elements of abstraction in the twentieth century.

Vuillard died at the beginning of World War II, just as the quiet, domestic world he had painted for so many years was about to be shattered.