MASP

Édouard Vuillard

The Princess Bibesco, Circa 1920

  • Author:
    Édouard Vuillard
  • Bio:
    Cuiseaux, França, 1868-La Baule, França ,1940
  • Title:
    The Princess Bibesco
  • Date:
    Circa 1920
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre cartão
  • Dimensions:
    112 x 81 cm
  • Credit line:
    Compra, 1958
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00130
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS


By Luiz Armando Bagolin
From the 1890s onwards, Édouard Vuillard began to produce many paintings and lithographs having interior scenes as their theme. He started painting his own house, passing through the homes of simple and humble people, workers, seamstresses, sellers, as well as people from his family and social circle, like his mother, grandmother and sisters. The Princess Bibesco is one of the paintings from this period. Vuillard found in these scenes the pretext par excellence for developing a synthesis, in his own way, of the principles established by the group of Nabis (Prophets) founded by Paul Sérusier, his friend Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, in which he also actively participated during the late 19th century. For example, Denis theorized that the painting should be no more than “a smooth surface covered in ordered colors”. However, more than that, the nabis (and Vuillard in particular) learned from Gauguin’s paintings – a fundamental reference to all of them – that the pictorial work allowed to model the subject, whatever it may be, adding to the visual experience a tactile dimension and, from this, the sentimental impression of the artist himself about the represented theme. There are numerous other works by Vuillard dating from the same time that use pictorial devices similar to those used in this painting. For example, the painting entitled La femme au fauteuil (Misia et Thadée Natanson), from 1896 (private collection), À table, from 1893 (MET/NY collection), which depicts the painter’s family, or Madame Vuillard au couture, from 1920 (National Museum of Western Art collection). It should also be mentioned The Printed Dress, from 1891, a work also belonging to the MASP collection. Vuillard painted the latter with large masses of colors and tones that are repeated on all planes, with the inscription of the figure wearing the title’s dress as its center of attention. In The Princess Bibesco, the pictorial work also develops with the same gestural power throughout the visible field. Lilacs, blues, greens and crimson are mixed with nacres and yellows, these mainly emitted by the light of a lampshade on the right. The opaque, whitish color brushes part of the hair of the main character, the princess, who is otherwise treated in the same manner as the furniture, wallpaper, curtains and the flower pot on the left. The color spreads through pasty brushstrokes, applied here and there, capturing the atmosphere of the semi-lit interior by a warm, caressed light. But here, the main subject of painting becomes its own material, a lesson or precept which some of the first avant-garde painters of the 20th century learned to value, consolidating it in manifestos and works in many other places.

— Dr Luiz Armando Bagolin is a professor and researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros da Universidade de São Paulo, IEB/USP, 2021




By Eugênia Gorini Esmeraldo
Vuillard received numerous commissions from Romanian princes Emmanoel and Antoine Bibesco, who actively socialized with the Parisian high aristocracy and took an interest in avant-garde theater, art, and literature. The Masp painting, Portrait of Princess Bibesco is a portrait of Marthe Lahovary, a Romanian citizen born in Bucharest, in 1888, and raised in Paris, where she died in 1973. She became Princess Bibesco through her marriage to Georges, uncle of Emmanoel and Antoine and was known for her literary activities and her memoirs. In this painting she is featured in a sumptuous room, surrounded by ornaments and furniture. In this painting and others of the same period, the scenery is detailed with restrained electric lighting, as pointed out by André Chastel, and the use of a somewhat ambiguous perspective, with a mirror in the background offering a glimpse of another environment or reflecting the room itself. Situated a little to the right, the princess and her majestic pose draw the viewer’s attention. Slightly reclined, with her left arm resting on the arm of the settee, her hands folded in front of her, the princess gazes at the viewer in a way that is both haughty and enigmatic, her elegant dark clothing highlighting her necklace. The yellowish lighting of the table lamp reflects on her hair, enhancing her overall appearance. The room is thickly carpeted and the tapestry hanging on the wall to the right, behind the chest of drawers, is also enhanced by the lighting of the table lamp. Here Vuillard makes use of perspective through an oblique line from the small table in the left corner to the table lamp on the chest of drawers, traversing the princess. Several vertical lines in the corner lead to another room and horizontal, more subtle lines define the ceiling, the doorway, and the darkness of the tapestry. To provide some relief from such rigidity, the artist introduced sinuous forms such as the princess’s reclining posture, the shawl wrapped around her and dropping to the floor, the round pillow on which she leans, and the flower vase on the table at the back. The painting dates from some time after 1907-1908, when Vuillard supposedly met Marthe Lahovary at the home of her relatives, as the princess herself wrote in a 1962 letter to baroness Elliot de Harwood. Camesasca dates the painting c.1920, by which time the princess had already earned herself considerable distinction, and this is plausible given that her countenance is no longer that of a young woman.

— Eugênia Gorini Esmeraldo, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



Search
the collection

Filter your search