Édouard Vuillard

In 1921 and 1922, soon after the end of World War I and the reopening of the Louvre, Édouard Vuillard created a cycle of six paintings for the entrance hall of the Villa Bauer in Basel, Switzerland. Four of these large-format pictures show exhibition rooms in the Louvre from antiquity to French rococo painting and two overdoors provide an intimate insight into the artist's collection. The cycle of paintings is of outstanding quality in both content and form, but it has seldom been examined and exhibited to date. Vuillard's Louvre pictures are a humanist manifesto for the social importance and responsibility of museums as places that preserve the evidence of human creativity for future generations.