Portrait of Aristide Maillol

Vuillard and Aristide Maillol met around 1890, when both were young men around the Nabi group in Paris and Maillol was still a painter and tapestry designer. By the time this was made Maillol was in his late sixties and known across Europe for heavy, calm female figures in bronze and stone. The museum dates the portrait between 1930 and 1935, one of a small group Vuillard painted of the friends from those early years. The paint is distemper, pigment bound in warm glue, a material he picked up making theatre scenery in the 1890s. It dries fast and completely matt, which is why the surface reads more like a wall than a canvas. The city of Paris took it into its collection in 1937.