Frieze Masters 2026

Mathias Chivot has recently suggested that the present sheet may also represent a first idea for one of the decorative mural panels commissioned from Vuillard by his art dealers, the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim, to decorate the ground floor of Bois-Lurette, their summer villa at Villers-sur-Mer, a seaside resort on the Normandy coast between Trouville and Cabourg. This series of thirteen large murals was painted over a period of three successive summers, in 1911, 1912 and 1913. The first panels to be painted, in August and September of 1911, were depictions of the garden at Les Pavillons, the villa at Cricqueboeuf in Normandy rented for the summer by Vuillard’s close friends Jos and Lucy Hessel.

As MaryAnne Stevens and Kimberly Jones have noted of the Bois-Lurette paintings, ‘The initial commission for these panels appears to date from August 10, 1911, when Vuillard lunched with the Bernheims at their villa while he was vacationing at Cricqueboeuf. Within days he was at work on the first group of paintings...Vuillard kept to his now standard practice of undertaking a rigorous preparation, producing small sketches in charcoal and pastel prior to attacking the large-scale work in distemper. Unlike so many of his earlier decorations, which were constructed in the studio from sketches and photographs...the Bois Lurette canvases were executed on site.’

The paintings for Bois-Lurette, for which Vuillard was paid 15,000 francs, were fitted into the wood panelling of the ground floor rooms of the villa, where they remained until the property was sold by the Bernheims in 1933. The paintings were removed from the walls of the villa in 1933 and reworked by Vuillard the following year, before eventually being dispersed.