Jean Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was a member of the group of French painters who called themselves Nabis. His best pictures were inspired by the immediate activity around him, to which he imparted a mysterious, ritualistic character.

Édouard Vuillard was born at Cuiseaux on Nov. 11, 1868. After his father's death in 1883, Vuillard's mother established a dressmaking workshop in their apartment in Paris. She encouraged her son's artistic ambitions from the first. Vuillard never married and, in terms of external incidents, led an uneventful life.

In 1889 Vuillard began to work at the Académie Julian, where he met Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, and Paul Sérusier. This was the nucleus of the Nabi (a Hebrew word meaning prophet) group. After the Salon of 1890 rejected Vuillard's work, he never again submitted anything for consideration by official circles. That year he made his first theater programs for...