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Label Text Edouard Vuillard, a member of the late-19th-century French avant-garde group known as The Nabis, admired the simplification, flattening, silhouetting, and patterning he saw in Japanese color woodblock prints. He is best known for the distinctive painting he made during the 1890s of women in highly patterned, flattened interior spaces with silhouetted figures. In La Modele en robe bleu, a woman wearing a coat and an extravagant hat sits in a room that seems to double as an artist's studio. Loosely painted in his preferred medium of distemper on cardboard, the painting reflects Vuillard's continuing interest in pattern. Source: News, July August September, 2008.
Exhibition History"E. Vuillard, " Paris, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, May - July 1938, no. 88 (Le Mondele, c. 1900)

"Nineteenth and Twentieth Century French Paintings from English Private Collections, " London, Marlbourough Fine Art, June - July 1965, no. 41 (ill)
Published ReferencesGuy Habasque, "Quand on vendait La Peau de l'Ours," L'Oeil, no. 15, March 1956, p. 18 (ill) - the article is on pp. 16-21
DimensionsFrame: 33 × 41 3/8 × 3 3/8 in. (83.8 × 105.1 × 8.6 cm)
Board: 23 5/8 × 31 1/2 in. (60 × 80 cm)
Image (visible): 23 × 31 in. (58.4 × 78.7 cm)
Accession Number 2008.24
Classificationspainting
CopyrightPublic Domain
SignedE. Vuillard (l,l)
Catalogue raisonnéSalomon and Cogeval p. 646, VII - 207
ProvenanceArtist, France. Collection La Peau de l’Ours, Paris [acquired in 1904]; (Hôtel Drouot, Paris, Collection de la “Peau de l'Ours”, 2 March 1914, lot 88); Maurice Denis (1870-1943), Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France [purchased from the previous, 1914]; Mme. Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France [inherited from the previous, 1943]; (Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 8 December 1959, lot 97). Marlborough Fine Arts, London. (Reid and Lefevre Gallery, London). Possibly James Kirkman (London). Max Sachar (Cape Town) [acquired by 1980]; (Sotheby’s, London, Important Impressionist & Modern Paintings, 3 December 1980, lot 29); (Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London); Martin and Melva Bucksbaum, Des Moines [purchased from the previous, 1981]; Des Moines Art Center [gift of Melva Bucksbaum, 2008]
Lady in Blue Paying a Call
Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines
Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines