Le Liseur

In the autumn of 1888 Paul Sérusier came back to Paris from Brittany with a small landscape he had painted on a cigar-box lid under Gauguin's direction, in pure, unmixed colour. His friends called it the Talisman, and within a year they were calling themselves the Nabis. Vuillard came into the group through a school friend from the Lycée Condorcet, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and this little picture from around 1890 shows Roussel himself, bent over a book. He is built from a few flat patches, a green coat, a pink face, a red chair back and a yellow wall, each edged with a dark line. Vuillard painted him in oil on a piece of cardboard about 34 centimetres high. The picture stayed in his studio and reached the Musée d'Orsay in 1990, accepted by the state in place of inheritance tax.