The Art Dealers

The Art Dealers at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, painted in 1912, shows Vuillard depicting the commercial world of the art market — the dealers whose galleries were essential to the careers of himself, Bonnard, and the other Post-Nabi painters. His relationships with dealers were long-standing and personal: Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune had been his primary dealers for years, and other important figures in the Paris art trade were part of his social world. An art dealer in his gallery — surrounded by the works he bought and sold, his own aesthetic preferences and commercial instincts shaping the public reception of living art — was a subject with self-referential dimensions: the dealer made Vuillard's work available to collectors, and Vuillard made the dealer visible to posterity. His 1912 treatment shows the more conventional spatial handling of his late style — the gallery's receding floor and hanging pictures rendered with greater illusionistic depth than his earlier Nabi work — while his characteristic integration of figure and environment through equal chromatic attention remained operative.

The later date shows in a somewhat more conventional spatial construction than the radical flatness of 1894 — the space of the dealer's office recedes with greater legibility. Nevertheless, Vuillard maintains his characteristic integration of figure and environment through the treatment of surrounding pictures, walls, and furniture with similar painterly attention.