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Edouard Vuillard, 'The Mantelpiece (La Cheminée)', 1905

Key facts
Full title The Mantelpiece (La Cheminée)
Artist Edouard Vuillard
Artist dates 1868 - 1940
Date made 1905
Medium and support oil on board
Dimensions 51.4 × 77.5 cm
Inscription summary Signed; Dated
Acquisition credit Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917, The National Gallery, London. In partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.
Inventory number NG3271
Location On loan: Long Loan to The Hugh Lane (2019 - 2026) (Group B), Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland
Collection Main Collection
The Mantelpiece (La Cheminée)
Edouard Vuillard

This picture – a combination of interior scene and still-life painting – shows Vuillard’s room at Château-Rouge in Amfreville, Normandy. His friends Jos and Lucy Hessel rented the house for the summers of 1905, 1906 and 1907.

A posy of wild flowers on the marble mantelpiece sits alongside a number of bottles, artworks tucked behind them. Another picture hangs on the wall, far above the painting rags that are hanging up to dry. The richly decorated walls compete with the still-life arrangement on the mantelpiece. Despite this interplay between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, the foreshortened mantelpiece, which appears to jut out of the picture, marks the artist’s move to a more naturalistic approach.

On the reverse of the painting there is a rapid sketch of three figures – a woman and two children – on a beach. The woman crouches down to pet one of the two dogs sat beside her.

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More paintings by Edouard Vuillard

La Terrasse at Vasouy, The Garden
La Terrasse at Vasouy, The Garden
Edouard Vuillard
This painting was the left half of a decorative panel commissioned by Jean Schopfer, a writer who published under the pen name Claude Anet. In 1935, over 30 years after its completion, Vuillard cut the panel into two and reworked it; the other half, La Terrasse at Vasouy, The Lunch, is also in th...
Not on display
La Terrasse at Vasouy, The Lunch
La Terrasse at Vasouy, The Lunch
Edouard Vuillard
This painting was the right half of a decorative panel commissioned by Jean Schopfer, a writer who published under the pen name Claude Anet. In 1935, over 30 years after its completion, Vuillard cut the panel into two and reworked it; the other half, La Terrasse at Vasouy, the Garden, is also in...
Not on display
Madame André Wormser and her Children
Madame André Wormser and her Children
Edouard Vuillard
This quiet domestic scene shows all the warmth and intimacy of Vuillard’s late paintings. We look into the elegant drawing room of a Parisian home – that of the Wormser family, at 27 rue Scheffer. The decoration reflects the taste of fashionable French society in the 1920s: pictures by Manet, Mon...
Not on display