Self-portrait, face study

Painted in 1889 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, this self-portrait face study dates to Vuillard's early career, when he was training at the École des Beaux-Arts and beginning to engage with the Symbolist and Nabi ideas that would transform his art. At this date he was in close contact with Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and the other painters who would form the Nabis group — a circle committed to the idea of painting as a flat arrangement of coloured surfaces expressing subjective feeling. The self-portrait as an exercise in self-knowledge had been central to Vuillard's practice throughout his career.

The early self-portrait shows Vuillard working through academic conventions of portraiture before his Nabi transformation — the face is modelled through tonal variation rather than the flattening and pattern that would define his mature work. Nonetheless, the searching quality of his self-observation is already present in the concentrated study of the face.