First Fruits
1899
Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)
Oil on canvas
The Norton Simon Foundation
Photography courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
At fourteen feet across, First Fruits is the largest canvas Vuillard ever painted. He likely sketched its composition from the window of a villa outside Paris where he passed the summer of 1899 with his sister, her husband, and their young daughter. The painting’s grand scale and border of flowering plants, however, indicate that this is no spontaneous, outdoor sketch but a kind of patterned, painted tapestry, originally conceived as a decoration for the private library of a Parisian banker. Though inspired by the pleasures of a family holiday in the countryside, the picture, as one contemporary critic remarked, was quite evidently “painted in a city and for a city apartment.”
Vuillard in the Norton Simon Museum
First Fruits takes center stage in a video from 2015 narrated by Emily Beeny, former associate curator, who chronicles Norton Simon’s acquisition of the work in 1973 and situates it within the context of its original commission. One of two mural-sized paintings made for the private library of Édouard Vuillard’s patron (the painting’s pendant, Window Overlooking the Woods, is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago), First Fruits was the subject of a substantial conservation treatment at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2014. Simon was a great admirer of Vuillard, purchasing four paintings and a suite of lithographs by the artist over the course of his career.
