The Vaudeville Show Magician

Painted around 1895 on cardboard, this work links Vuillard to the Parisian avant-garde theater world in which the Nabis were deeply embedded. The Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, founded by Lugné-Poe, was the primary venue for Symbolist drama in Paris, staging works by Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and others that the Nabis found sympathetic to their own aesthetic project. Vuillard designed programs and contributed to the theater's visual culture throughout the 1890s. A magician at a vaudeville show represents his engagement with popular entertainment as subject matter worthy of serious artistic attention, held now in the Bührle Collection in Zurich.

Painted on the absorbent surface of cardboard, the work has a dry, chalky luminosity typical of Vuillard's 1890s pieces. Figures are compressed into the shallow pictorial space with minimal modeling, their forms identified through dark contour and flat areas of local color rather than light-and-shadow description.