Vial Painting Symbolism

Edouard Vuillard is the representative painter of Nabis, the most active painting group in Paris in late 19 Century. Nabis was established under the direct influence by Paul Gauguin's symbolistic ideas and works. It to some extent leads to Vuillard's close relationship to the symbolism movement. Then what are the symbolistic factors of Vuillard's paintings? This is the question I am going to solve through this thesis. This thesis firstly introduces the social background of symbolism movement and its theory, which offers a standard to judge the symbolistic factors of Vuillard's works. Next it explores Vuillard's practice in different areas in 1890s and the interaction of the painting, poetics and theater, which is the precondition for analyzing the symbolistic factors of his paintings. The third, fourth and fifth parts of the thesis concretely explain the symbolistic characters of Vuillard's paintings through numbers of examples of works.I try to make a relatively systemic and concrete analysis of the symbolistic factors of Vuillard's paintings on basis of the former research of other scholars, in order to advance the further research on Edouard Vuillard.