Arthur Fontaine

Painted in 1901 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, this portrait of Arthur Fontaine captures a prominent figure in the cultural world of the Parisian bourgeoisie in the early Third Republic. Fontaine was an engineer who became a notable collector and cultural patron, part of the Symbolist-Nabi circle that overlapped with Vuillard's patrons around the Natanson brothers and the Revue Blanche. By 1901 Vuillard was increasingly sought after as a portraitist by the Parisian upper middle class, producing a body of intimate domestic portraits that form a crucial social document of the cultivated bourgeoisie at the turn of the century.

Painted on cardboard, the portrait places Fontaine within an interior setting where his figure is integrated with the surrounding decor — books, furnishings, ambient space — in the Vuillardian manner of treating sitter and environment as a unified pictorial field. The handling is more fluid than his 1890s intimiste work, with looser spatial definition.