He and the Nabis circle would also become illustrators for the newly created La Revue Blanche, the literary magazine founded by Alexandre Thadée, and Alfred Natanson in 1891 (Vuillard would become quietly infatuated with Misia Natanson, Thadée’s wife). He worked for the avant-garde theaters, creating sets and designing programs, alongside Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Paul Sérusier. Inspired by his style, Vuillard adopted a similar technique to Gauguin of painting large swaths of pure color. He, along with Denis, and Roussel, also attended the Académie Julian together it was here that Vuillard joined the student movement against the rigid academic treatises of painting and became part of the Nabis group, which sought to convey the sensation of a subject-or an exaggerated feeling. The group was further inspired by the landmark exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s paintings in the Café Volpini at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. Vuillard studied at the École des Gobelins in the evenings where he received extraordinary marks for his drawings. His father died when Vuillard was fifteen and his mother and sister set up a corset shop in their Paris apartment. As he and his brother prepared for military careers, he was awarded a scholarship to the Lycée Condorcet, one of the oldest and most prestigious in Paris. Among Vuillard’s classmates were sculptor Ker-Xavier Roussel and painter Maurice Denis. While at Lycée Condorcet Vuillard established a close friendship with Roussel, whose wealthy father was a patron of the arts and placed his son in the studio of artist Diogène Maillart as an assistant. Though a serious young man, Vuillard was persuaded by Roussel and Maillart to pursue his calling as an artist, a vocation that Vuillard’s mother (despite the family’s financial hardships) supported. The youngest of three children, Vuillard was said to be an exemplary student with an inclination to paint early in his childhood. His father was a civil servant, a retired military captain working as a tax collector. Vuillard was born in Cuiseaux in Saône-et-Loire in eastern France and his family moved to Paris in 1877.
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