Theodore Duret

Theodore Duret at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, painted in 1912, depicts one of the most significant critics in the history of Impressionism — the man who in 1878 had published the first sustained scholarly defense of the Impressionist group and who had been an intimate of Manet, Whistler, and the entire founding generation of French modernism. By 1912 Duret was in his mid-seventies, the battles he had fought on behalf of the Impressionists long won, their canonical status fully established. Vuillard's portrait of this elder statesman of the French art world brought together the painter of the generation succeeding Impressionism with the critic who had championed the generation before him — a meeting across the history of French modernism that the National Gallery's holding makes available to American audiences. His characteristically direct and environmentally integrated treatment of the elderly sitter — placed within his study's books and papers, rendered with the same attentive close-valued technique he brought to all his portrait subjects — gives the portrait an intimacy and specificity that academic portraiture of a public figure would have sacrificed for gravitas.

Duret's elderly figure is rendered with the directness of observation characteristic of Vuillard's later portraiture — less absorbed into the surrounding environment than his 1890s figures, the face given particular careful attention. The surrounding books and papers of Duret's study provide the characteristic Vuillard integration of person and intellectual environment.