No artist has ever so suggested the soul of an interior—the sense of habitation.
—Julius Meier-Graefe, on Vuillard

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
—Wallace Stevens

… peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.
—Stéphane Mallarmé

There are few artists whose signature work is as immediately likable but at the same time as difficult to plumb as that of Edouard Vuillard. His best work is both supremely fetching and quietly unfathomable: as easy, familiar, and welcome as dinnertime yet fraught with—what? Aldous Huxley was a great admirer of Vuillard’s work. In an unpropitious moment, he declared that the painter was “the Dharma-Body manifested in the bourgeois bedroom.” How that would have alarmed Vuillard! Quite right, too.

Many of Vuillard’s best-known works are quite small, hardly bigger than a sheet of foolscap, yet they register an abundance of emotion—too much, it seems, for the available real estate.

The Dharma-Body aside, there is something enigmatic about Vuillard’s charm. He died in 1940, in his seventy-second year. His work is indisputably “modern”—the critic Julius Meier-Graefe described it as Cézanne “translated into more intimate terms”—yet in many respects it seems to hail from a previous vintage. Vuillard’s lifelong friend Pierre Bonnard was a year older but seems, taken all in all, almost a generation younger.¹ Why?

It is hard to say. Size is one ingredient, at