Portrait de Kerr-Xavier Roussel

Portrait de Kerr-Xavier Roussel of 1930 is the finished version of the maquette that preceded it — the portrait of Vuillard's brother-in-law and Nabi colleague in the fully realized form that the preparatory sketch had worked toward. Roussel had spent his career developing his own version of the Post-Impressionist tradition — his pastoral mythologies and Arcadian landscapes with mythological figures were quite different from Vuillard's domestic intimism, pursuing a form of classicizing poetry that had few precedents in the Nabi movement. By 1930 both men were in their early sixties, their long professional friendship shaped by both aesthetic difference and personal intimacy, and Vuillard's portrait of Roussel gave permanent form to that relationship. His late portrait style — more atmospheric and conventionally described than his early Nabi work — gave the family portrait a quality of dignified documentation appropriate to a subject whose professional significance merited recognition alongside the personal familiarity.

As with the other Nabi portrait maquettes, the handling is direct and exploratory — color observations made without the polish of final presentation. Roussel's features are established quickly and confidently, the sketch quality conveying the comfort of long familiarity between painter and subject.