Theodore Duret

Theodore Duret at the National Gallery of Art, painted in 1912, depicts one of the pioneering critics and historians of Impressionism — the man who in 1878 published the first sustained defence of the Impressionist group and who had been a friend and advocate of Manet and Whistler since the 1860s. By 1912 Duret was in his seventies, the battles he had fought now won, and Vuillard's portrait documents a figure who had lived through the entire history of the movement from its embattled beginnings to its triumphant acceptance. The NGA's canvas shows Vuillard's late portrait style at its most directly observed.

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.