‘Maman, c’est ma muse’

Édouard Vuillard painted his mother more than 500 times. Alastair Sooke explores their relationship

Lots of great artists have portrayed their mothers – Whistler and Lucian Freud are two well-known examples – but none has done so with the fervour and frequency of the avant-garde French artist

Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), who painted his own mother, a pious, hard-working Parisian seamstress, more than 500 times. “Maman, c’est ma muse,”

Vuillard, a lifelong bachelor, told his biographer in 1920, a decade after Freud coined the term “Oedipus complex”.

Surprisingly, given the important role she played in his art, there has never been an exhibition focusing on their devoted relationship. Now, though, a new show at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham that documents Vuillard’s life with his mother in Paris – they lived together until her death, in 1928, at the age of 89 – asks how he could summon progressive art out of the ostensibly banal world of petit-bourgeois domesticity.

“Vuillard doesn’t fit with the macho image we have of the avant-garde artist,” says Francesca Berry, curator of the exhibition, which also contains several photographs of Vuillard’s mother that were taken by the artist using a hand-held Kodak camera. “But he still produced avant-garde art, concerned with interiority, memory, and feelings.”

The bond between mother and son – Vuillard was the youngest of her three children, and her favourite son – was cemented by the early death of his father, Honoré, a tax collector and former naval captain, who died in 1884. At that point, Vuillard was an intelligent 15-year-old pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, a prestigious secondary school in Paris. Madame Marie Vuillard (1839-1928), still only in her mid-40s, ran a small sewing business from home.

A cheerful, piano-playing woman, who clearly doted on Vuillard, she encouraged his desire to become an artist. In the late 1880s, Vuillard attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, before falling in with a group of dissident art students who had formed a secret, mystical brotherhood called the “Nabis” (the Hebrew word for “prophets”).

Vuillard, who had red hair and a long beard, became known as “le nabi Zouave”, after the French North African regiment, the Zouaves, famous for their colourful uniform and exuberant facial hair.

Today, the innovations of the Nabis – who were inspired by Gauguin, and produced flat, decorative paintings – tend to be downplayed in histories of modern art. But the Nabis, whose ranks also included Pierre Bonnard, were a vital force within the Parisian avant-garde during the 1890s – the decade when Vuillard depicted his mother most frequently, and created his most experimental paintings.

At first glance, Vuillard’s work from the 1890s seems like nothing much: nondescript interiors, in an autumnal palette of brown, ochre, aubergine and sage green. A few recognisable pieces of bourgeois furniture, including a circular dining table and a distinctive mirrored armoire, repeatedly crop up, almost like characters in a play.

Against this backdrop, Madame Vuillard appears in various guises: arranging her hair, doing housework in the kitchen, sitting at a table after a meal, or interacting with her daughter, Marie, who married one of Vuillard’s friends. Sometimes, she is a smiling, benign, Buddha-like presence. On other occasions, she seems domineering, even fierce.

Early critics noticed the