Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait of 1906 at the Bührle Collection in Zurich shows Vuillard applying his intimist method to his own face with the same analytical equanimity he brought to his depictions of others. His self-portraits are notable for their psychological evenness: there is none of the existential drama of Van Gogh's self-scrutiny or the social self-fashioning of Courbet's self-representations. Vuillard simply places himself within his visual field and observes what he finds there — face, surroundings, light — with the patient attention that was the fundamental operation of his art. By 1906 he had moved through his most radical Nabi period and was working in the more atmospheric but still formally distinctive mature style that would characterize his work until his death. The Bührle Collection, assembled by the Zurich industrialist Emil Georg Bührle, was one of the finest private collections of French modern painting in the German-speaking world, and its Vuillard holdings document the Swiss collecting enthusiasm for intimist French work that was distinct from the German interest in more assertive Expressionist alternatives.

Vuillard renders himself without flattery but with the same quality of attention he brought to any sitter — the face built from small color marks that describe specific light effects rather than idealized features. The surrounding environment receives treatment equal to the face, the self-portrait being less about psychological revelation than about the painter's presence within a particular visual field.