Édouard Vuillard's Public Garden

Édouard Vuillard

The most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the work of Édouard Vuillard, the quintessential Parisian artist whose work spanned the 1880s through the 1930s, was organized and presented by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, in the Spring of 2003. The exhibition features The Public Gardens (1894), a series of nine large panels considered the grandest and most complex of Vuillard’s decorative projects. Created for a private salon, The Public Gardens has appeared publicly in its entirety only once, at a Paris exhibition in 1906; the panels were dispersed at auction in 1929. Eight of the nine panels are being brought back together as part of this exhibition.

Visualization and Animation

The IRC was approached by the National Gallery to recreate the original Paris Salon, complete with the nine paintings and furnishings. This photo-realistic visualization will be featured in a documentary on Vuillard that aired on PBS, and was screened in the exhibition itself. There was no documentation of the series in its original setting and this visualization would be the first opportunity to experience it as Vuillard had intended.

Modeling of the salon was based on photographs and paintings from that time period. The IRC worked closely with National Gallery curators and scholars to achieve an authentic look. The photo-realistic rendering of the final 2-minute scene took more than 10 full days of computer time to create.

Production Notes