Rose Pickering

Thesis: Memory, Time and the Muse: An Exploration of Édouard Vuillard’s Representations of Women through a comparison with Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

Supervisor: Professor David Peters Corbett   Advisor: Dr Caroline Levitt

Funded by Courtauld Scholarship (The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust)

The project explores a word-image connection between Édouard Vuillard’s artwork and Marcel Proust’s novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) by focusing on depictions of women. Studying Vuillard and Proust as contemporaries, the analysis compares both accounts of French modernity through their “feminised” verbal and visual language. Images of women in domestic spaces occur through the entirety Vuillard’s oeuvre, while women, central throughout, bookend Proust’s novel. This study pinpoints how Vuillard’s work has been overlooked in modernist contexts because of its overly “feminine” content. Where Proust is considered a key figure of the avant-garde, Vuillard is pushed to the margins of modernism. The study shows how a comparison with Proust can clarify Vuillard’s particular diagnosis of modernity, demonstrating how his artworks connect to broader themes and shed light on the suppressed aspects of modernism, namely domesticity and, by extension, the female space.