Théodore Duret by Vuillard, Edouard

This is Édouard Vuillard’s 1912 portrait of the art critic Théodore Duret, now in a private collection. Vuillard had been a founder of Les Nabis, the avant-garde group that flattened painting into planes of pure color and pattern. By 1912 the Nabis were long gone, and Vuillard had turned back toward realism, but not all the way back.

Look at the tension between the figure and the wall. The deep crimson background is pure Nabi: flat, saturated, pressing forward like a Japanese print. Against it, Duret’s face and hands are modeled with careful, naturalist volume. Vuillard is painting a man of letters with the stylistic split of his own career visible around him.

Duret was one of the first serious critics to defend the Impressionists, he wrote Manet’s biography and traveled to Japan with Caillebotte, collecting prints that later influenced artists like Vuillard himself. Here Vuillard returns the favor, placing the critic inside an intellectual den of papers and bookshelves, surrounded by art.

A portrait of an art world passing: the critic who explained one movement, captured by the painter moving past another.