The Art Dealers

The Art Dealers at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, painted in 1912, shows Vuillard in his later career treating the world of the art market — the dealers who sold his work and with whom he had long-standing professional relationships. By 1912 Vuillard had moved somewhat away from the radical flatness of his Nabi period toward a more conventional spatial handling, though his interest in figures absorbed into their immediate environment persisted. Art dealers in their gallery — surrounded by the works they traded in — offered him a characteristically layered environment where the human and the artistic merged.

The later date shows in a somewhat more conventional spatial construction than the radical flatness of 1894 — the space of the dealer's office recedes with greater legibility. Nevertheless, Vuillard maintains his characteristic integration of figure and environment through the treatment of surrounding pictures, walls, and furniture with similar painterly attention.