La Pierreuse Gabrielle and Suzanne Desprès
Vuillard and Lautrec
Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard
Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s style of portraiture influenced Edouard Vuillard enormously, and for both artists, women are at the very center of their art. Dedicated to depicting the bohemian world of Paris in the late 19th/ early 20th centuries, both painters relied on actresses, singers, dancers, and prostitutes as their models, and portrayed them with great character and verve.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Pierreuse Gabrielle, 1893
“La Pierreuse Gabrielle” (or “The Streetwalker Gabrielle”), as she is referred to in the catalogue raisonné, was described in a contemporary study of Parisian society as an “ex-dancer,” “great and robust” and “of an open and comely figure.” It is obvious in our pastel that Lautrec recognized the strength and imposing character of this woman. An important symbol of Lautrec’s desire to portray the real bohemian world of Paris in the 1890s, she appears in numerous works.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman Seated in a Garden, 1891, National Gallery of Art, London
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Moulin-Rouge, La Clownesse Cha-u-Kao, Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur (Gabrielle is the figure to the left of the famous performer Cha-u-Kao)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Deux femmes de la rue des Moulins, 1891, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Sofa, 1894-96, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Edouard Vuillard
Edouard Vuillard, Suzanne Desprès, c. 1908
In 1908, Vuillard began work on a portrait of the the highly acclaimed actress of stage and screen Suzanne Desprès (1875-1951). Showing the influence of Lautrec in the application of color, and in the pose and attitude of the model, this portrait was done 15 years after Lautrec’s of Gabrielle, but has much in common with the earlier work.
Alfredo Müller, Suzanne Desprès dans poil de carotte, c. 1905
Succesful in her own right, Desprès married Lugné-Poe the actor, producer, and owner of Thêatre L’Oeuvre, in 1898. Together they were instrumental to the success of the Nabis artists, hiring them to paint backdrops and design program covers for his theater productions as well as finding clientele to buy their work.
Although Vuillard must have known Suzanne Desprès well, he didn’t paint her portrait until 1908. By then, she was considered one of the great European stage actors and would soon transition to a career in film.
Louis Geisler, Tournée du Théatre Antoine, 1903, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Suzanne Desprès in Maria Chapdelaine (1934)
Poster for Louise (1939)
Edouard Vuillard, Portrait of Suzanne Desprès, 1908, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen
Our painting, which was done from life, is a study for a larger painting purchased from the artist by the Musées Nationaux de France in 1939.
The parallels between these two works show the techniques Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec employed to create strong portraits of women. While Lautrec was more of a participant than Vuillard in the bohemian world, both artists created extraordinary works of compelling directness in female portraiture and in the enduring subject of stage performers.