All about his mother

Fin-de-siècle Paris was not just the art capital of the world, it was also the fashion capital. In 1901, 300,000 Parisians were employed in the rag trade, and one of them was Édouard Vuillard’s mother.

Stout, sensible and self-sufficient, Mme Marie Vuillard was no Mimi out of La Bohème, embroidering flowers in a draughty garret. She was the independent patronne of a dressmaking atelier — more of a couture flat, admittedly, than a couture house, operating out of rented apartments in the garment district. Before being left a widow with three children, she had prudently invested in a small business producing dresses and made-to-measure corsets for a fashion-conscious petit bourgeois clientele. With her seamstress mother and daughter Marie —coincidentally known as Mimi — among her employees, Mme Vuillard was a multitasking materfamilias, managing the workshop and the household while supporting her son Édouard in his artistic ambitions.

Édouard returned the favour by featuring his mother in more than 500 paintings, of which a small selection is on show at Birmingham’s Barber Institute in a charming exhibition marking the 150th anniversary of his birth. Centring on the Barber’s own ‘Madame Vuillard Arranging her Hair’ (1900), these intimate pictures are a radical departure from the usual French fin-de-siècle celebrations of woman as love object, let alone sex object. They’re a celebration of ‘her indoors’ from a filial perspective: images of female domestic industry and the atmosphere in which it was wrapped — an atmosphere Vuillard had breathed since childhood.

He was still living at home, aged 61, when his mother died in 1928. The homes changed as one small rented flat was exchanged for another but the domestic routines continued uninterrupted, the women sewing around the dining-room table while the man of the house painted in his ‘bedroom studio’.