Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Les Lilas (Le bouquet schématique)

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940)
Les Lilas (Le bouquet schématique)
stamped with signature 'E Vuillard' (Lugt 2497a; lower right)
oil on board laid down on cradled panel
13 ¾ x 11 in. (34.9 x 28 cm.)
Painted circa 1890

Provenance
Estate of the artist.
Sam Salz, Inc., New York (acquired from the above).
Donald and Jean Stralem, New York (acquired from the above, 1953); sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 8 May 1995, lot 42.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner.

Pre-Lot Text
Property from the Estate of William Kelly Simpson
“Hardly a member of the lay public interested in Egypt has not read and enjoyed [William Kelly Simpson’s] Literature of Ancient Egypt, An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry or learned from his Ancient Near East: A History” writes Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Rita Freed of the late Egyptologist, William Kelly Simpson (1928-2017).
William Kelly Simpson was born in Manhattan in 1928. He attended Manhattan’s Buckley School, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and Yale University from where he graduated in 1947 with a degree in English, and obtained his Master’s degree in Philosophy in 1948. That same year, he made his initial foray into Egyptology, when curators W.C. Hayes and Ambrose Lansing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art hired the graduate as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Egyptian Art. Imbued with an insatiable curiosity and precocious mind, Professor Simpson penned his first Egyptological article—an exploration of a Fourth Dynasty portrait head—at just twenty-one years old. That piece, published in the Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, heralded a remarkable scholarly output, with more than 130 articles and twenty books written throughout his lifetime.
Professor Simpson’s position within The Met’s Department of Egyptian Art forever changed the trajectory of his life, and, indeed, the wider field of Egyptology. It was during his time at The Met that Professor Simpson participated in his first archaeological expedition—an excavation in Iraq sponsored by the British School of Archaeology—and decided to pursue graduate work in Egyptology. In the early 1950s, the young scholar commuted between his work in New York and his studies at Yale, all while serving in the 101st Armed Calvary of the New York National Guard. In June 1953, Professor Simpson married a granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Professor Simpson studied for his doctorate under noted Egyptologist Ludlow Bull, and wrote his dissertation on the excavation of the pyramid of Amenemhat I. It was not until obtaining his Ph.D. from Yale in 1954, however, that Professor Simpson made his first trek to Egypt, after being awarded a prestigious Fulbright research fellowship. Professor Simpson led excavation teams at the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur and at Mitrahineh for two years. Upon returning to the United States, he was immediately offered a fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and in 1958 was appointed Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literature at Yale.
During Professor Simpson’s forty-six years in academia, he rose to Associate Professor, Professor, and Chair of Yale’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literature; was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities; and positioned Yale as one of the foremost centers for Egyptology. Among his many archaeological projects in Egypt were the famed Pennsylvania-Yale Expeditions recording New Kingdom tombs and Meroitic cemeteries, the 1960s UNESCO campaign to rescue Nubian monuments threatened by the construction of the Aswan Dam, and excavations at the Giza Pyramids and sites in Nubia. “[Professor Simpson] served the monuments of Egypt... with unstinting passion,” noted fellow scholar Hussein Bassir. “He served as a major channel between Egypt and the US,” Bassir added, “to the benefit of the two nations and the archaeological and cultural ties between the two countries.”
The earliest acquisitions in Professor Simpson’s collection were made by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the co-founder of The Museum of Modern Art, from whom many works passed by descent. Mrs. Rockefeller acquired Henri Matisse’s radiant 1928 still life, Plâtre, bouquet de fleurs, in 1930, three years before founding MoMA. Beginning in the 1970s, Professor Simpson put together one of the greatest collections of Nabi paintings ever assembled, led by three 1890s masterworks by Édouard Vuillard: Les Lilas (circa 1890), Autoportrait à la canne et de canotier (circa 1891-1892) and the extraordinary interior Misia et Vallotton à Villeneuve (1899). Christie’s is proud and deeply honored to present these highlights of the Nabi movement along with other exceptional modern European paintings, drawings and sculpture from the Estate of William Kelly Simpson in our Impressionist & Modern Art Evening, Day and Works on Paper Sales this fall.

Those of us who knew Professor Simpson as students at Yale remember a man of easy erudition, a sharp wit (one friend remembers it rather more powerfully as “rapier-like”), and wide curiosity. I met him as a graduate student, when a few of us who were members of the Yale Senior Society called Wolf’s Head (with its Egyptological history) thought it would be wonderful if he could come to the house and tell us about the collection of Egyptian artifacts acquired over more than a century by the society or its members. He did so with great speed, as the “secrecy” of these societies was rather more closely guarded at that time (the early 1970’s) than it is today.
What amazed him was less the artifacts—though they turned out, of course, to be genuine and of real interest to him—but the whole context in which they were placed, particularly an impressive room used for rituals about which none of the current members had the slightest notion. The room was reportedly designed by no less than Louis Comfort Tiffany, and a small group of us sat in it with Mr. Simpson and speculated wildly about its original purposes and meaning. It was, in effect, a three-hour seminar in a type of “social archeology” of 19th century Yalies, who were almost as far removed from us in the early 1970’s as the ancient Egyptians.
Mr. Simpson was so fascinating and erudite that all of us wondered what his non-academic life was like, and a friend and I stayed on and talked with him about his art collecting and his interests that strayed far from hieroglyphs and mummies. Indeed, he knew much more than I did at the time about the area in art history that I was beginning to study—French and particularly Parisian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The next week, when he came again to Yale to teach a seminar, my friend and I went with him to the Yale University Art Gallery, and I well remember talking in real detail about 19th century works on paper, about the two small panel paintings by Vuillard then in the gallery’s collection, and about a particularly wonderful 1872 painting by Alfred Sisley.
We sat in the courtyard under a seated figure by Henry Moore and talked about the relationships between art and history—about the “currency” of much of the most interesting modern art versus the quest for eternity or timelessness that we too often attribute to artists of the Ancient World. For him, if a work engaged his attention, his emotions, and his intellect, it was worth studying in depth, and I have powerful memories of the three of us trying to decode a particularly complex, but tiny Vuillard panel painting from the early 1890’s, focusing particularly on a small triangle of pink above the head of the principal figure.
What IS it? He kept asking us. He was convinced that it was something actually present at the scene and that Vuillard had carefully composed the small painting in the room it represents, while the figure—his sister, we speculated—was absorbed in her work. For him, it was a kind of mimetic puzzle—something or some visual element that EXISTED and that presented itself to us as a problem to solve. Mr. Simpson thought that every one of Vuillard’s painted marks, no matter how tiny, had two functions—compositional and representational—and that the artist played games with his viewers by creating “degrees of difficulty” in the identification of forms that turned each painting into a game.
For my friend and me, Mr. Simpson’s private seminar was an exercise in close looking that is too rare in our education, an INTENSE and focused visual analysis—rarer and rarer in the age of the internet with its millions of images and the ubiquity of “scanning” at the expense of “looking.”
Mr. Simpson’s collection—and we always called him Mr. Simpson—was all about the adventure of “looking,” and, when we see it today as it re-enters the market from which it came, we know that he would be happy that others would RE-engage in this process of close looking—whether at a Vuillard panel, a drawing by one of the many artists whose gestures he prized, a sculpture, or—in my memory—the little 1872 Sisley that remains at Yale. He learned the art of observation—of CLOSE looking—by studying his collection of Indian “miniatures”—as we call them—where details abound.
But he studied his Nabis works, of which he formed a definitive private collection, with the same care that he sought “details” in Indian paintings. Whether the objects in the window of Bonnard’s tightly bounded Parisian streets or the painting on the wall over the bedchamber of a dying patient in a 20th century Vuillard, each work benefitted from his repeated attention.
I remember him coming into a room in Wolf’s Head Society at Yale, looking at a great painted circle on a gilded ceiling and at the mummy behind glass on the back wall. He was dapper and shy—but not really THAT shy, and we listened as he taught us to LOOK. As I think about him now, after many years with too few actual contacts, I think of a man not unlike the young Vuillard in the wonderful self-portrait Mr. Simpson treasured—looking at us, as...