Lilacs

In February 2009 the art collection of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé was auctioned at the Grand Palais in Paris, and this tall panel came up as lot 11. When the hammer fell, the Musée d'Orsay used the state's right of pre-emption, which lets a French museum step in at the final price. The picture had begun around 1899 as a decoration for the Paris flat of the princes Emmanuel and Antoine Bibesco, friends of Vuillard and of Marcel Proust. Vuillard worked it in distemper, a glue-based paint that dries matt. The woman bending forward in a full dark dress is Misia Natanson, the pianist whose husband ran the avant-garde Revue blanche. The painter Félix Vallotton once stood at the left, until the panel was reworked in 1908 and he was painted out. The museum names no one in the figures that took his place.