The panels mentioned by Vuillard in his journal are without a doubt the present five paintings, which were sold by Thadée Natanson at auction in 1908, several years after his divorce from Misia. In the catalogue written by Félix Fénéon to accompany the sale, the five paintings were entitled and described in terms of a decorative ensemble. For Fénéon the unity of the series is most readily perceived through Vuillard's continuous development of an exquisite, overall chromatic harmony. Since Vuillard's suggestively imprecise, densely textured paintings are at times hard to read and his sumptuous accords of color difficult to reproduce accurately in color reproduction, it seems worth reprinting Fénéon's catalogue descriptions here:

L'album (fig. 2): In the center, a group of three women on a canapé, looking at an open album. Another woman, to the right, is arranging flowers. Two others are grouped together at left; the seventh is at the edge of the frame. . . . An overall effect of red and green enlivened by yellow. This effect is condensed in the background, in small juxtaposed dabs, but is diffused in varying tones in the rest of the composition, the red descending all the way to chestnuts and blacks in order to ascend as far as vermilions and pinks, the yellow fading all the way to beige. The paint [is] sometimes applied in tiny brush strokes, at others is spread in barely nuanced solid areas (masses), the two procedures contrasting nowhere more than in the center.⁹

Le pot de grès (fig. 5): On a table where flowers, odds and ends of cloth, notebooks, and boxes are lying about, a stoneware vase holds a bouquet in full bloom. Four women grouped in pairs, one seated and three standing, surround the vase moving from the right-hand foreground to the left-hand background. Almost all the color components seen in L'album and La table de toilette.¹⁰

La table de toilette (fig. 4): Between two bouquets of flowers and at different ends of a table, two women. Of one nothing appears but the top of the head, a part of the blouse, an arm, and the skirt with its folds; of the other, only the chignon, the hidden profile, the nape of the neck, the back, and the arms; in the foreground, her hands rest on a draped piece of furniture. The still life includes a vase, a box, a mirror, and some pieces of cloth. What distinguishes the general impression here, analogous to that of L'album, is two dull tones of gray harmonized with tender pinks and beiges, and enlivened by reds, a flashing orange accent, a red heightened with black, and a green and orange accord.¹¹

La tapisserie (fig. 3): With her left hand a young woman embroiders her yarns on the stretched canvas; on her knee her right hand holds a skein of yarn from which strands hang down to the balls of yarn in the basket. Between the weaver and the window, the curtain of which is being drawn back by the two hands of a young girl, a bush of flowering branches intervenes. Opposite the young woman, another child of whom we see only the upper torso. The only particularity, a large black area on which a bright red arabesque stands out.¹²

Le corsage rayé (fig. 1): Two women are smelling flowers arranged in vases. A child enters in the rear. The general effect, here more condensed, appears all the more precious. The new feature would be, along with a yellow and pink flash in the upper right, a woven patch of red and beige.¹³

Though Vuillard's journal provides no further documentation concerning either the circumstances of the commission or the evolution of the project, paintings and photographs made by the artist between 1896 and 1899 of rooms in the three Natanson residences tell us something about the subsequent installation of the decoration. L'album and La table de toilette are seen hanging on opposite walls of the ground floor sitting room at La Grangette in Valvins, in two paintings by Vuillard datable to the second half of 1896.¹⁴ Then, beginning in 1897, after the Natansons had given up La Grangette, views by Vuillard of the Natanson's rue Saint-Florentin salon and dining room clearly show four of the five panels hanging on background walls: L'album can be seen over Misia's piano in Cipa écoutant Misia au piano (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) and Le salon des Natanson (Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, Zürich); Le pot de grès and La tapisserie are hanging to the left and right of the dining room door in Le déjeuner, rue Saint-Florentin (Misia et Cipa) (private collection).¹⁵ A corner of Le corsage rayé appears in an unpublished photograph by Vuillard of Vallotton holding an infant by a window in the Natanson dining room (Archives Salomon, Paris). Finally, photographs Vuillard took about 1899 of the billiard room in Misia and Thadée's house at Villeneuve show that L'album and Le pot de grès had been moved there for a time.¹⁶ This evidence, which suggests a curiously tentative, haphazard installation of the panels, led Gloria Groom to conclude that Vuillard expressly designed for the Natansons a kind of portable decoration whose panels could be separated and arranged according to the owner's whim.¹⁷ This deduction contradicts not only Fénéon's catalogue entries but other period sources—including Thadée himself, for whom the panels constituted an harmonious ensemble, one that had, furthermore, been exhibited as such at S. Bing's Hôtel de l'Art Nouveau in December 1895.¹⁸

In the course of 1895 the German-born, Paris-based dealer-entrepreneur Siegfried Bing, whose enthusiasm for the decorative arts had already resulted in a number of highly visible commercial ventures promoting the art of Japan, determined to transform his Paris townhouse on the corner of the rue Chauchat and the rue de Provence into a showcase for the "new art" (fig. 6).¹⁹ At the time of the opening of the Maison de l'Art Nouveau's inaugural exhibition in December 1895, Bing published a lithographed program stating his intentions:

ART-NOUVEAU intends to group together all artistic manifestations that have ceased to be a reincarnation of the past,—to offer, without excluding any categories and without preference for any school, a gathering place for all works marked by distinctly personal feeling.
ART-NOUVEAU will struggle to eliminate Ugliness and pretentious luxuriousness from all things in life,—to imbue everything down to the least objects of utility with the refinement of taste and the charm of simple beauty.²⁰

Bing had not been content merely to unite under one roof the widest possible range of decorative arts in the new style; he had approached artists to design complete interiors for his gallery. The Nabis were called upon to participate: Maurice Denis created what was to be a much-criticized bedroom and Ranson painted panels for a dining room with wainscoting and furniture by Henry Van de Velde. Vuillard—and here all recent writers are in agreement—did not design new wall decorations, but instead sent the panels created for Thadée and Misia. The paintings were indeed listed in Bing's exhibition catalogue as a "decoration in five panels belonging to Madame Thadée Natanson,"²¹ but since they were painted in November 1895, which Vuillard states they were, then they could have been finished only a matter of weeks before the opening of Maison de l'Art Nouveau, at the end of December. Camille Mauclair, who had been one of the Nabis's strongest supporters and wrote numerous introductions for Le Barc de Boutteville catalogues,²² sheds light on this conjunction in a sharply critical review of Bing's first exhibition. Unhappy with the new direction in Vuillard's art, Mauclair implies that Bing's Art Nouveau played a significant role in this unfortunate development. In passing he provides important information on the origins of the "Thadée Natanson" decoration:

M. Bing has spoken to the two young men most highly praised for their abilities as decorators, M. Vuillard and M. Denis, and he has given them a sitting room and a bedroom to decorate. M. Vuillard, of whom I have often spoken with sympathy and by whom one knows exquisite little japonizing pictures, has sent several panels that don't connect with anything, that don't make any sense in relation to the lighting in the room, and that repeat, in an impasto of ungraceful blobs, a banal motif of women emerging from jumbles of insipid flowers.²³

A more authoritative source, the architect Henry Van de Velde, states categorically that Bing offered a model room to Vuillard in June 1895, as soon as he had made the decision to create L'Art Nouveau:

Of the works to be executed for the exhibition "L'Art Nouveau," he [Bing] reserved the lion's share for me: a dining room in cedar encrusted with red copper, a smoking room in Congolese padouk with panels in glass mosaic, a collector's cabinet and a rotunda with woodwork in lemon wood framing elegant, washed out panels by Besnard. He conferred the execution of the mural decoration of the dining room to the painter Ranson, that of the salon to the painter Besnard and to Georges Lemmen, the ceramic or mosaic panels and the carpets. From the painter Maurice Denis, Bing commissioned the furniture and decoration of a bedroom, from the English artist Charles Conder, a boudoir. An antechamber would be decorated by Vuillard and, for the rest, the program was still undecided.²⁴

Until now the exact location of the small salon in which Vuillard's panels were shown has not been established. According to Arsène Alexandre, Vuillard's "harmonious and discrete panels" were in a room contiguous to the great circular salon on the central floor with decorations by Albert Besnard.²⁵ This precision is confirmed by Edmond Cousturier, who wrote a piece on Bing's model rooms for the Revue blanche in January 1896:

. . . let's go down [from the upper floor] to the circular salon decorated by M. Besnard. An antechamber precedes it, where panels by M. Édouard Vuillard stage scenes of women in interiors. From the ceiling there hangs a chandelier by M. Pierre Roche. M. Vuillard is an exceptional harmonist; he feels the charm of intimacy; the enigma in which every solitary being seems to live. He vocalizes in minor; his tones are neutral and muted, his combinations subtle.²⁶

The antechamber or small salon in question can be seen in the plan of the central floor of the Maison de l'Art Nouveau (fig. 7) immediately to the right of the round salon.²⁷ The room has five different surfaces, counting the narrow wall between the windows. Furthermore, the proportions of these walls correspond to those of the five Album panels permitting the following installation: the squarish Corsage rayé (fig. 1) on the wall opposite the windows, then moving clockwise, the longest panel, L'album (fig. 2) on the long wall, the vertical Tapisserie (fig. 3) between the windows, and the Table de toilette (fig. 4) and Le pot de grès (fig. 5)—long considered pendants on the basis of compositional features that interrelate these two panels more completely than any of the others—respectively to the left and right of the door leading into the Besnard salon. Even the slightly narrower width of the wall to the right of this door is reflected in the shorter length (by 3 centimeters) of Le pot de grès vis-à-vis its pendant. A drawing by Vuillard, which we discovered and identified in the Archives Salomon, corroborates this hypothetical arrangement and offers additional evidence that the panels must have been designed with Bing's model room in mind.²⁸ The drawing represents five separate scenes, readily identifiable with the Album panels because of their unusual proportions.²⁹ They appear in the same order as proposed above with the paired panels opposite the long horizontal panel. Here too, the last panel, which will become Le pot de grès, is slightly shorter in length than its pendant. Moreover, though only roughed out, the scenes in the drawing present views of women in gardens, not in interiors, implying that before he arrived at his definitive subjects, Vuillard was planning a decoration for the walls of Bing's antechamber.³⁰ Vuillard must have first received the offer from Bing, referred to by Mauclair and Henry Van de Velde, and then found in Thadée Natanson a willing patron to back the project—Thadée would later write a spirited defense of Bing's enterprise in the Revue blanche—much as Maurice Denis succeeded in getting partial funding for his bedroom from Bing himself.³¹ In any event, the only true installation the Album panels ever seem to have had was in the Maison de l'Art Nouveau, where they remained on view for several months before being returned to the Natansons, to be hung in an arbitrary manner in their various residences.³²

Félix Fénéon was the first to recognize that the abstract linear arabesque played a fundamental role in the overall design of the Album panels. Again from his auction catalogue entries:

It is apropos of this painting [L'album (fig. 2)] and of the ensemble to which it belongs, that one could make an observation that applies to the works of this artist and the best among his contemporaries; namely: the design, or the definition of objects, is conceived in these paintings only by means of the formal "plastic" value of the arabesque. The pleasure of naming the objects plays a role, no doubt, in the pleasure that the images provide, but it is not the essence, the essence is abstract.³⁵

In a preface written for the same catalogue of Thadée Natanson's 1908 auction, Octave Mirbeau devoted a paragraph to Vuillard in which he especially praised the artist's wall decorations, alluding thereby to the presence of the Album panels in the sale. Like Fénéon in his formal analysis of L'album, Mirbeau emphasizes the abstract quality of Vuillard's art, but he goes beyond Fénéon in maintaining that these abstractions are imbued with a sumptuous sensuousness, and that they are the rhythmic inventions of a musical imagination:

Vuillard, whose refinement seems to me the most directly and the most voluptuously sensuous, seems to me also the most impassive in the midst of the tenderness or the acuteness of the sensations that he courageously evokes in all their complexity. His will intervenes in the ragout of his combinations only to mark its personality. His sole concern is deliberately abstract. It seems to remain all the more abstract in intention because it is the more deliciously, the more sumptuously sensuous. If his sensibility has something intoxicating about it, he is subtle and ingenious enough always to hold it knowingly in balance. Let me add that he is never more at ease and that one never appreciates him more than when his imagination—I would like to call it musical—is able to have free rein over ample enough surfaces: his magic needs walls.³⁶

The revisions in favor of greater unity carried out by Vuillard in somewhat earlier easel paintings such as La dame en bleu (1895, oil on cardboard; private collection) and Autoportrait: Vuillard décorateur (1894/95, oil on canvas; private collection) have been developed and adapted for mural decoration in the Album panels.³⁷ The cycle forms a continuous horizontal frieze, 65 centimeters in height, with a single vertical accent, La tapisserie (fig. 3), whose dimensions were predetermined by the two windows flanking it on the outside wall of the room. Movement from left to right throughout the entire frieze is generated by a single flowing arabesque, which operates as a billowing undulation made by the placements of flowers, the leaning of the women's heads, and the positioning of their arms. Twice the course of the arabesque is interrupted by vertical retards: first by the figure standing at right in L'album, a contravention augmented by the vertical format of the immediately succeeding Tapisserie, in which, however, the shoulder, sleeve, and work cloth of the weaver make a patch of light pointing to the right and even the folds of the curtain yield to the dynamic; and then again, though less emphatically, by the figure seen from behind, standing at right in La table de toilette (fig. 4). Vuillard's frieze is predominantly planar; the scale of the two figures entering from an indeterminate remove barely registers as a slight inflection of this planarity. However, as the arabesque advances, the flat, fused composition gives way in two instances, midway through L'album, and again in La table de toilette, swelling magically into larger waves of atmospheric space. It is in these passages that Vuillard concentrates and orchestrates his pictorial variants: modeled features, strong clair-obscur, solid colors and verticals in the midst of a decoration dominated by planar faces, soft clair-obscur, ornamental motifs, and erratic sinuosities. Critics of Vuillard have frequently had to resort to musical comparisons, and these passages are like a sweeping modulation of tone.³⁸ With the Album panels Vuillard achieves a breakthrough in his handling of pictorial contrasts, moderating still further the virtuoso counterpoint of his 1893 pictures and inaugurating new harmonic progressions, which, while as expansive as those introduced in the Jardins publics, now seem less idiosyncratic and, appropriately, more Art Nouveau.

In his critique of Vuillard's model room for Bing cited above, Camille Mauclair detected and lamented the new direction Vuillard's art had taken.³⁹ His exhibition review intimates that Vuillard had allied himself with Bing's revival of the decorative arts in France and was now working under the banner of Art Nouveau. In the context of Mauclair's remarks, it is useful to recall Fénéon's assertion above that the arabesque is the essential abstract formal feature not only of Vuillard's Album panels, but of the best works by Vuillard's contemporaries as well.⁴⁰ Looking at the other model rooms decorated by the Nabis for Bing, we discover that however dissimilar the rooms may seem initially they all employ the arabesque as an underlying unifying theme: Vuillard's sitting-room decoration, Denis's bedroom frieze The Love and Life of a Woman (Frauenliebe und Leben) and Ranson's dining-room murals depicting young peasant women working in fields all propose designs dominated by the sinuous rhythms of the linear arabesque.⁴¹ Bing's role in the Nabis' development of a broadly adaptable group aesthetic is confirmed in a letter written by Bing to Denis on 30 August 1895, some two months after the original commission:

No matter how large my premises seem to be, they are small in proportion to our program and will allow the presentation of one apartment. But the salons, dining room, etc. imperceptibly assume a certain character of elegance, for perfect homogeneity should exist in each room. . . . The ensemble will also have to form a harmonious whole.⁴²

The commission for the model rooms at l'Art Nouveau undoubtedly grew out of a successful Nabis group collaboration with Bing the previous year. In February 1894 Bing traveled to New York and Boston to organize important auctions and exhibitions of Oriental art. While in the United States, he took time to assess for himself the recent, much-acclaimed progress being made by the Americans in the realm of the decorative arts. Of all the studios and workshops Bing visited, that of the stained-glass maker Louis Comfort Tiffany impressed him the most, and before returning to Europe he discussed with Tiffany the possibility of having stained-glass windows made after designs by young French artists. Upon his return to France, Bing was in touch with the Nabis through one of their members, Henri Ibels, who in turn contacted Vuillard. In a letter written in late May 1894 Vuillard tells Maurice Denis of Bing's proposal:

Here is a proposition which comes from Ibels. He has made the acquaintance of Bing, the merchant of curios who would like, with the help of artists-decorators in France, to take advantage of a special type of colored glass where one can achieve, it seems, all kinds of color, including gradations in the same color while the glass remains transparent. He has, at his home, samples of this type of glass and of its utilization by artists of the country (who are Americans). Ibels has told him about all of us and Bing is waiting to show us the said samples. He would take it upon himself to have our sketches executed because the fabrication itself is a secret which they will not divulge. Would you like to come to see it? It might interest you. A lot of us have made an appointment at about 3PM in my studio. Come, since it should interest you and Bonnard most of all.⁴³

On the basis of correspondence exchanged between Bing and Denis, Gabriel Weisberg, in Art Nouveau Bing, determined that most of the Nabis had completed their cartoons by the end of October 1894.⁴⁴ Vuillard notes in a journal entry of 4 November that Bonnard, Roussel, and Ranson had all met with Bing concerning the stained-glass windows: "Monday morning Bonnard busy with Bing, Viau, Hoentschel . . . the afternoon . . . caught Bonnard who got paid this morning with Kerr and Ranson (the Ibel's business)."⁴⁵ In the end Tiffany created thirteen stained-glass windows after designs by eleven French painters, eight of whom were Nabis: Maternité by Bonnard, Paysage by Maurice Denis, Été by Ibels, Moisson fleurie by Ranson, Le jardin by Roussel, three small windows by Sérusier, Parisiennes by Vallotton, and Marronniers by Vuillard—the three remaining artists were Albert Besnard, P. A. Isaac, and Toulouse-Lautrec.⁴⁶ The windows were exhibited first at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts on the Champs-de-Mars, which opened on 25 April 1895, and then again at Bing's Salon de l'Art Nouveau at the end of the year.⁴⁷ It has generally been agreed ever since that the Nabis achieved a remarkable degree of homogeneity in their Tiffany stained-glass designs through the bold compartmentalization of form and the shared application of a cloisonniste aesthetic. Along with the model rooms for Bing, which would mark a high point of Nabis involvement with Art Nouveau, the Tiffany windows are an important chapter in the history of the brotherhood. Both of Bing's commissions stimulated the Nabis to develop a group aesthetic in the broader context of a concerted effort to renew the original spirit of their brotherhood.⁴⁸

Claude Roger-Marx was the first writer on Vuillard to evoke the heightened Symbolist aura of the Album panels:

The deliberate avoidance of precision contributes greatly to the evocation of the faces and to the mystery which the painter achieves by following in some measure the methods of Denis. These phantoms, which we recognize as living beings in their striped and spotted bodices, these little bourgeois sisters busy with cutting and darning (as a work-box or an unfolded cloth lets us know) are soaked in symbolism. It is impossible to discover to what family belong the bouquets, half hydrangeas, half chrysanthemums, that spangle the spaces with their whites and greens and contrast with the flowers on the wallpaper, turning the persons into something like ghosts. On these offertory tables many objects more or less distinct are seen—fallen petals, boxes, books. The spell resides in these vaguely sketched gestures, embryonic states of mind and the correspondences invented between objects, faces and environment. It is born of declared or latent sympathies between tones as difficult to define as the names of the flowers. Amber, tortoiseshell, onyx, ebony, have composed this double symphony of their rare substance and muffled note.⁴⁹

Roger-Marx's invocation of Maurice Denis in this context is especially appropriate, for the bedroom frieze conceived by Denis for Bing's Maison de l'Art Nouveau presents not only striking formal similarities with the Album panels, but also certain spiritual affinities. There is another artist, however, not cited by Roger-Marx, who is a spiritual and formal source for both Vuillard's and Denis's art—an artist who was later referred to by Denis as the very origin of plastic symbolism, "the Mallarmé of painting": Odilon Redon.⁵⁰ In 1892 Albert Aurier had in effect predicted that the Nabis would fall under the spell of Redon's symbolism much as they already had the synthetism of Redon's younger contemporary Gauguin:

Among the bearers of the good word that the young love to evoke, another artist, as original, as profoundly idealist, even stranger and more terrifying, who, through his lofty scorn for physical (material) imitation, through his love of dreaming and spirituality, had to effect, if not as immediately as the preceding [artists], at least by rebound, the orientation of the new souls of today's artists: Odilon Redon.⁵¹

Born in 1840, Redon had produced more than half of his lithographic oeuvre before he was given his first retrospective, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in the spring of 1894. The show was a revelation for the Nabis and it stimulated Thadée Natanson to write the first of a series of reviews in support of the artist he dubbed the "Prince of Dreams":

More profoundly than in that pleasure which is the remembrance of our sensations, thought delights even more when bathed in an imprecise atmosphere, where its fantasies are able to play freely, and which inebriates: the dream—. . . it is the dream that consecrates poets, and its quality that makes the quality of their works. In this case it is the entire inspiration of a plastic art.⁵²

Later in 1897 Thadée published a piece on a new lithographic album by Redon, La maison hantée: "The whites powder, quiver; glimmers, vapors, flashes, reflections, shivers, variegated patterns, contribute to the magic of the blacks, and if they don't create them altogether, they complete their splendor, make the essence of their velvet glisten and make something miraculous of their absolute darkness."⁵³ Then in 1899, on the occasion of a group exhibition at Durand-Ruel that was in effect an hommage à Redon by the younger generation, including Vuillard, Thadée wrote:

M. Odilon Redon has taught the young who surround him what liberties talent authorizes; he has made it possible for them to deepen the resources of their profession through the use of lithography. He possesses to the highest degree those primordial plastic gifts for which they have the very greatest concern and respect. That's what gives profound meaning to his presence.⁵⁴

Vuillard owned a copy of Redon's lithographic album Les origines (1883), that he probably bought in 1893.⁵⁵ The influence of these, as well as other of Redon's early tormented visions, on Vuillard's own lithography is most apparent in the lithographic programs Vuillard designed for the Symbolist Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in 1894. During that season Vuillard's evocations of scenes from plays by Ibsen, Hauptman, and Maurice Beaubourg become, with his growing mastery of the lithographic medium, utterly hallucinatory in their frightening intensity.⁵⁶ Yet for a number of these same L'Oeuvre programs of 1894 Vuillard also designed more debonair lithographs advertising La revue blanche that were printed beside the dramatic scenes on the same sheet of paper, though they presumably appeared on the back when the programs were folded in two. These prints (figs. 8, 9), while presenting the same Redonesque obscurity, blurring, and sfumato effects as their pendants, have none of the nightmarish quality associated with the theater scenes. With their linear arabesques, their imprecision, and their gentle air of reverie they reflect instead the shift toward a more serene and lyrical imagery perceptible in Redon's lithography after 1890. More important, Vuillard's Revue blanche lithographs represent an unexpected adaptation of Redon's art, applying, as they do, a rarefied Symbolist aesthetic to the banal "observable and verifiable" motif of women in interiors, with flowers, reading—La revue blanche.⁵⁷ Along with other of Vuillard's prints dating to 1894/95, these images are important, if small scale, charming antecedents of the Album panels, where Vuillard would draw more deeply on the art of Redon to generate an intensified Symbolist aura of mystery and reverie, and explore further the magical transforming potential of light and atmosphere.⁵⁸

Vuillard's decision to translate the imagery and effects of his black-and-white art into the muted colors and dense patterns of the present decoration may also have been prompted by Redon's example, possibly even with the encouragement of Thadée Natanson. It was only with the 1894 Durand-Ruel retrospective that Redon's admirers first became aware of the lithographer's recent experiments with oil and pastel and his new interest in color, which Gloria Groom has already suggested may have influenced the new color effects of the Album paintings.⁵⁹ Again from Thadée's review of that exhibition:

In addition to the admirable black lithographs and some of the sheets from the unforgettable albums, it is the pastels and the paintings which constitute the novelty and the rarity of the show. No doubt the enchanted eye already had an inkling of the brilliance of colors in the intensity of his blacks. But it has never had the complete joy of it. The painter, like the lithographer, asserts himself as the Prince of Dreams.⁶⁰

Although Redon's well-known paintings and pastels of women in profile and flowers date to after 1900⁶¹ and the incandescent colors associated with his works of the mid-1890s seem far removed from the muted coruscation of Vuillard's contemporary palette, Redon's sudden desire at the age of fifty-five to reinterpret his visionary art in terms of exquisite color relationships must have proved a major source of inspiration for the young Vuillard.