PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF WILLIAM KELLY SIMPSONThose of us who knew Professor Simpson as students at Yale remember a man of easy erudition, a sharp wit (one friend remembers it rather more powerfully as “rapier-like”), and wide curiosity. I met him as a graduate student, when a few of us who were members of the Yale Senior Society called Wolf’s Head (with its Egyptological history) thought it would be wonderful if he could come to the house and tell us about the collection of Egyptian artifacts acquired over more than a century by the society or its members. He did so with great speed, as the “secrecy” of these societies was rather more closely guarded at that time (the early 1970’s) than it is today. What amazed him was less the artifacts—though they turned out, of course, to be genuine and of real interest to him—but the whole context in which they were placed, particularly an impressive room used for rituals about which none of the current members had the slightest notion. The room was reportedly designed by no less than Louis Comfort Tiffany, and a small group of us sat in it with Mr. Simpson and speculated wildly about its original purposes and meaning. It was, in effect, a three-hour seminar in a type of “social archeology” of 19th century Yalies, who were almost as far removed from us in the early 1970’s as the ancient Egyptians.Mr. Simpson was so fascinating and erudite that all of us wondered what his non-academic life was like, and a friend and I stayed on and talked with him about his art collecting and his interests that strayed far from hieroglyphs and mummies. Indeed, he knew much more than I did at the time about the area in art history that I was beginning to study—French and particularly Parisian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The next week, when he came again to Yale to teach a seminar, my friend and I went with him to the Yale University Art Gallery, and I well remember talking in real detail about 19th century works on paper, about the two small panel paintings by Vuillard then in the gallery’s collection, and about a particularly wonderful 1872 painting by Alfred Sisley. We sat in the courtyard under a seated figure by Henry Moore and talked about the relationships between art and history—about the “currency” of much of the most interesting modern art versus the quest for eternity or timelessness that we too often attribute to artists of the Ancient World. For him, if a work engaged his attention, his emotions, and his intellect, it was worth studying in depth, and I have powerful memories of the three of us trying to decode a particularly complex, but tiny Vuillard panel painting from the early 1890’s, focusing particularly on a small triangle of pink above the head of the principal figure.What IS it? He kept asking us. He was convinced that it was something actually present at the scene and that Vuillard had carefully composed the small painting in the room it represents, while the figure—his sister, we speculated—was absorbed in her work. For him, it was a kind of mimetic puzzle—something or some visual element that EXISTED and that presented itself to us as a problem to solve. Mr. Simpson thought that every one of Vuillard’s painted marks, no matter how tiny, had two functions—compositional and representational—and that the artist played games with his viewers by creating “degrees of difficulty” in the identification of forms that turned each painting into a game. For my friend and I, Mr. Simpson’s private seminar was an exercise in close looking that is too rare in our education, an INTENSE and focused visual analysis—rarer and rarer in the age of the internet with its millions of images and the ubiquity of “scanning” at the expense of “looking.”Mr. Simpson’s collection—and we always called him Mr. Simpson—was all about the adventure of “looking,” and, when we see it today as it re-enters the market from which it came, we know that he would be happy that others would RE-engage in this process of close looking—whether at a Vuillard panel, a drawing by one of the many artists whose gestures he prized, a sculpture, or—in my memory—the little 1872 Sisley that remains at Yale. He learned the art of observation—of CLOSE looking—by studying his collection of Indian “miniatures”—as we call them—where details abound.But he studied his Nabis works, of which he formed a definitive private collection, with the same care that he sought “details” in Indian paintings. Whether the objects in the window of Bonnard’s tightly bounded Parisian streets or the painting on the wall over the bedchamber of a dying patient in a 20th century Vuillard, each work benefitted from his repeated attention. I remember him coming into a room in Wolf’s Head Society at Yale, looking at a great painted circle on a gilded ceiling and at the mummy behind glass on the back wall. He was dapper and shy—but not really THAT shy, and we listened as he taught us to LOOK. As I think about him now, after many years with too few actual contacts, I think of a man not unlike the young Vuillard in the wonderful self-portrait Mr. Simpson treasured—looking at us, as dapper as Mr. Simpson, Vuillard with his straw hat, his natty clothes, and his face with wide eyes and a mouth covered by his red mustache and beard. For Mr. Simpson, as for Vuillard, looking was more important than talking. Richard R. BrettellThe Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, The University of Texas at DallasPROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF WILLIAM KELLY SIMPSON

Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940)

Le peintre Maximilien Luce dans son atelier

Details

Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940)
Le peintre Maximilien Luce dans son atelier
stamped with signature 'E. Vuillard' (Lugt 2497a; lower right)
oil on board
9 7/8 x 14 7/8 in. (25.1 x 37.9 cm.)
Painted circa 1899

Provenance

Estate of the artist.
Sam Salz, Inc., New York.
George Armour, New York (1956).
Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York (1977).
William Beadleston, Inc., New York.
Acquired from the above by the late owner, July 1980.

Literature

P. Ciaffa, The Portraits of Edouard Vuillard, Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, New York, 1985, pp. 270-271, no. 134 (titled Félix Vallotton).
A. Salomon and G. Cogeval, Vuillard, Le regard innombrable, Catalogue critique des peintures et pastels, Paris, 2003, vol. II, p. 559, no. VII-34 (illustrated in color).

Exhibited

New York, Wildenstein & Co., Inc., La revue blanche, Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, November-December 1983, p. 88 (illustrated in color, p. 45; titled Portrait du peintre Vallotton).
New Brunswick, New Jersey, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, The Circle of Toulouse-Lautrec, An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist and His Close Associates, November 1985-February 1986, p. 182, no. 178 (illustrated, fig. 211; titled Portrait of Vallotton).
New York, The Katonah Gallery, The Intimate Eye of Edouard Vuillard, May-August 1989, p. 46, no. 7 (illustrated in color, p. 33; titled Portrait of the Painter Vallotton).

Brought to you by

Vanessa Fusco

vfusco@christies.com +1 212 636 2050

Lot Essay

According to Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, "Hitherto thought to be a portrait of Félix Vallotton, this picture is in our view a portrait of the neo-Impressionist painter and anarchist, Maximilien Luce. Vuillard may have been introduced to him by Félix Fénéon at La revue blanche. Luce appears in a photograph taken by Vuillard in 1901, in which the principal Nabi painters are shown standing in a line at L'Etang-la-Ville, then three years later in a second photograph, likewise taken at L'Etang-la-Ville, where he is seen dining with Kerr-Xavier Roussel and his children. Vuillard painted him a second time around 1907 (VII-395), when the artist, best known for his paintings of the Commune, held an exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery" (op. cit.).

More from Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale

View All