![]() ![]() Fully-dressed bourgeois men recline in a woody landscape as if they were in a canvas by Titian, while their lovers' clothes lie abandoned with the picnic basket. It both inaugurates the French modern pastoral tradition, to which Vuillard's Park belongs, and mocks it. Painted five years before Vuillard was born, Manet's painting is satirical, violent, embarrassing, funny, surreal, disturbing. You only have to compare Lunch at Vasouy, or his even more ambitious large-scale decoration The Park, in their pastoral dignity, with Edouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863) to see the problem. Vuillard definitely belongs to the category of artists it is easy to dismiss as not interesting. And it is a moment to consider what makes art, or painting, worth bothering with. He was Lucie's lover, as well as her surrogate son.Ī retrospective of his work is about to open at the Royal Academy. Yet he was also a man about town, always at the theatre, the Ballets Russes, the cabaret. When she died in 1928, the Hessels took care of him. He lived with his mother until he was 60. Vuillard (1868-1940) led a double life, like that of a character in Proust. The civilised milieu at Vasouy is that of his friends Jos and Lucie Hessel, rich art and theatre aficionados. The unfathomable quirky emotion in the Tate painting is love - love for these people, this world. Vuillard's paintings monumentalise a life that might look, to us, safe and - for once the word is not loaded, just factual - bourgeois, but for him this world was a utopia he watched with desire, admiration, envy. The trees above them form a fractured pattern. ![]() The men wear straw hats, the women long dresses. ![]() There are bottles of wine on the table, flowers in a vase. While couples walk and children play in a cultivated garden or park, well-dressed men and women gather around a lunch table covered with a red and white cloth. But the subject is scarcely the stuff of history painting, or joyous decoration, or anything to justify this scale.Ī group of middle-class people are having lunch in the open air, in the Normandy countryside near Honfleur. The original dimensions are more than two metres high and nearly four metres wide. It is a decoration, a mural-scale canvas painted in distemper, hence the appearance, as if it were dusty. ![]()
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