Maquette pour un portrait de Maillol

Maquette pour un portrait de Maillol of 1930 is a preparatory study for a portrait of Aristide Maillol — the sculptor whose monumental classicizing bronzes were among the defining achievements of early twentieth-century French sculpture. Maillol and Vuillard were contemporaries who had known each other through the Nabi circle and its aftermath — Maillol had briefly been part of the Nabi group before his sculptural vocation pulled him in a different direction. His physical presence — massive, vital, associated in the public mind with the classical Mediterranean world his sculptures invoked — would have presented a different formal challenge than Vuillard's typical domestic interior portrait subjects. The maquette's preparatory function — working out the approach before the finished portrait — makes it a document of Vuillard's thinking process, the sketch capturing the essential formal decisions that the finished work would consolidate.

The sketch-portrait captures Maillol's physical presence with the directness of rapid observation — the sculptor's distinctive face and figure established in a minimum of marks. Vuillard's color sense remains acute even in preparatory work, the flesh tones and surrounding environment differentiated through chromatic rather than tonal means.