Maquette pour un portrait de Bonnard

Maquette pour un portrait de Bonnard of 1930 belongs to the series of preparatory studies Vuillard made for his late portraits of Nabi colleagues — Maurice Denis, Maillol, Roussel, and Pierre Bonnard — creating a documentary record of the founding generation of French Post-Impressionism in old age. Bonnard and Vuillard's friendship, sustained across more than forty years, was one of the most significant relationships in French art of the early twentieth century: two painters who had shared the Nabi formation but developed in entirely different directions — Bonnard toward chromatic sensuality and the intimate nude, Vuillard toward domestic pattern and social documentation — while remaining in close personal contact. The maquette as a preparatory format captured the first direct encounter with the familiar face in a specific moment and setting, the freshness of observation that the more worked finished portrait would necessarily moderate.

The preparatory quality allows Vuillard to capture Bonnard with a fresh eye unconstrained by commissioned portrait conventions — the color notes rapid and intuitive rather than carefully calculated. The surrounding environment is barely suggested, the focus concentrated on the face and posture that Vuillard would elaborate in the finished portrait.