Maquette pour un portrait de K.X. Roussel

Maquette pour un portrait de K.X. Roussel of 1930 is a preparatory study for a portrait of Ker-Xavier Roussel — Vuillard's brother-in-law, who had married his sister Marie, and a painter in his own right who was part of the Nabi circle. Roussel's presence in Vuillard's domestic and professional world was uniquely intimate: as a family member who was also an artistic colleague, he occupied a position at the intersection of the biographical and the professional that gave this portrait unusual depth. Roussel's own painting — pastoral mythologies, Arcadian landscapes with figures — was quite different from Vuillard's domestic intimism, but they shared the Nabi formation and the sustained friendship that came from it. The maquette as a working document captures Vuillard's initial response to the familiar face of his brother-in-law — a face he had known for decades — with the freshness of a direct first observation before the work of the finished portrait had abstracted and resolved it.

As a maquette, the work prioritizes compositional and coloristic decisions over finished detail. Roussel's figure is established in broad, confident strokes that map the essential relationship of figure to setting, with the surrounding interior rendered in shorthand that will be elaborated in the final portrait.