Édouard Vuillard

Édouard Vuillard turned the cramped Paris flat he shared with his mother into a lifelong subject. She ran a dressmaking business from home, and the rooms were full of fabric, wallpaper and women bent over their work, and that is what he painted, again and again, until the figures almost dissolve into the patterns around them.

In the 1890s he belonged to the Nabis, a group of young painters who followed Gauguin's idea that a picture was first of all a flat arrangement of colour and shape. Vuillard took that indoors. His small, densely patterned interiors, a mother and daughter lost among clashing prints, are the heart of what came to be called intimisme, the art of quiet domestic life.

He moved in the lively circle of the Revue Blanche, an avant-garde Paris journal, and painted decorative panels for its editors and other cultivated hosts. In later years his work grew more conventional and detailed, and he made a comfortable living as a portraitist, working right up to his death as the Germans advanced on Paris in 1940.