Portrait d'Aristide Maillol

Portrait d'Aristide Maillol from 1930 at the Musée d'Art Moderne represents the finished portrait that the maquette prepared. Maillol's monumental female sculptures had made him one of the most recognized French artists of the early twentieth century, and Vuillard's portrait commemorates a friendship between two artists from the same generation who had arrived at very different artistic positions. Together the four Nabi portraits — Denis, Maillol, Bonnard, Roussel — constitute Vuillard's collective memorial to the movement's aging survivors.

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.