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On the other hand, it does seem possible that Vuillard has influenced another English painter, Miss Ethel Sands: only, in making attributions of influence one cannot be too careful. About direct affiliations especially, as this case shows, one should never be positive.
Bonnard and Vuillard, unlike Aristide Maillol, though being sensitive and intelligent artists who make the most of whatever serves their turn they have taken what they wanted from the atmosphere in which they work, are hardly to be counted of Cézanne's descendants.
Armand Seguin, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Filiger, Serusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Chamaillard, Verkade, O'Conor, Durio, Maufra, Ranson, Mayol, Roy, and others are to-day happy to call themselves associates of Paul Gauguin in this little movement in which the idolatry of the line and the harmonies of the arabesque were pursued with joyous fanaticism.
Nowadays he is classed as an Intimist, in which category and with such men as Simon Bussy, Ménard, Henri le Sidaner, Emile Wéry, Charles Cottet, Lucien Simon, Edouard Vuillard, the Griveaus, Lomont, Lobre, and others, he is still their master, still the possessor of a highly individualised style, and in portraiture the successor to such diverse painters as Prudhon, Ricard, and Whistler.
Also there are a few who belong to the older movement, e.g. Mr. Walter Sickert, M. Simon Bussy, M. Vuillard, Mr. J.W. Morrice. Ariadne in Naxos. Is Strauss, our one musician of genius, himself the pivot on which the wheel is beginning to swing? To bother much about anything but the present is, we all agree, beneath the dignity of a healthy human animal.
It is as probable that Miss Sands has been influenced by Sickert, who has much in common with Vuillard, as by Vuillard himself; and most probable of all, perhaps, that the three have inherited from a common ancestor something which each has developed and cultivated as seemed to him or her best.
He gives us a work of art. To consider a picture by Vuillard, whose work is often compared with that of Bonnard, might help us here. Vuillard loves what he paints, and his pictures are attractive, as often as not, chiefly because they represent lovely things. A picture by Bonnard, for all its fascinating overtones, has a life entirely of its own.
Each is a Stylites on a pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John, Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards, Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They never approach normal life.
Nick was kindly confusing and shaming Miss Ingate with a short history and catechism of modern art, including such names as Vuillard, Bonnard, Picasso, Signac, and Matisse all very eagerly poured out and all very unnerving for Miss Ingate, whose directory of painting was practically limited to the names of Raphael, Sir Joshua, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough, Turner, Leighton, Millais, Gustave Doré and Frank Dicksee.
La recherche de la paternité was ever an exciting but hazardous pastime: if Bonnard and Vuillard, in their turn, are claimed, as they sometimes are, for descendants of Renoir, with equal propriety Sickert may be claimed for Degas. And it is worth noting, perhaps, as a curious fact, that in the matter of influence this is about as much as at the moment can be claimed for either of these masters.
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