Self-portrait, face study

Vuillard's 1889 self-portrait face study was made during his final years at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was training alongside Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Paul Sérusier under the teaching of Gustave Moreau's former student Élie Delaunay. The academic environment of the École was already deeply at odds with the ideas the young Nabis were developing: Sérusier had returned from Brittany in 1888 with a small landscape painted under Gauguin's direction that Gauguin's formal principles had taken to their logical extreme — the painting Maurice Denis memorably called 'The Talisman,' which demonstrated the Nabi principle that a picture was above all a flat surface covered in colors arranged in a certain order. Vuillard's self-portrait at this date shows a young painter whose training was academic but whose artistic identity was about to be transformed by the Nabi ideas he was absorbing through his close friendships. The Orsay's holding of this early work allows comparison with his mature self-portraits, documenting the distance between the conventional tonal modeling of his student phase and the radical flatness he would achieve in the early 1890s.

The early self-portrait shows Vuillard working through academic conventions of portraiture before his Nabi transformation — the face is modelled through tonal variation rather than the flattening and pattern that would define his mature work. Nonetheless, the searching quality of his self-observation is already present in the concentrated study of the face.