Portrait d'Aristide Maillol

Portrait d'Aristide Maillol of 1930 is the finished portrait that followed the preparatory maquette — the monumental sculptor of classical bronzes encountered in the intimate domestic setting of Vuillard's portrait approach. Maillol's physical presence — he was known for his robust, Mediterranean vitality, his deep connections to the classical French countryside of Banyuls where he had been born and where he worked — would have challenged Vuillard's intimist method: this was not a figure who dissolved easily into a domestic interior's patterns but a physical force that asserted itself against any surrounding. His late portrait style, more spatially coherent than his early Nabi work, would have found ways to anchor Maillol's presence within a specific environment while rendering the sculptor's specific physical character with the directness of observation that his late portraiture consistently achieved.

In the finished portrait, the maquette's rapid color notes are refined into a more sustained observation of Maillol's physical presence. Vuillard renders the sculptor's characteristic solidity — appropriately enough for an artist who worked in three dimensions — through the weight and mass of his figure within the pictorial field.