Alexandre Bernheim moved the family framing business to Paris in 1863 and transformed it into one of the greatest art galleries of the period. Firstly supporters of the Barbizon school and later the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, the gallery held several groundbreaking exhibitions including the retrospectives of Van Gogh’s work in 1901 and Cézanne’s in 1907. When Alexandre’s sons Josse and Gaston took over the gallery in 1906, they hired Félix Fénéon to run their contemporary department which led them to showing works of Vuillard, Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Dufy.

In ‘Confidence, les enfants Bernheim au salon’ Vuillard has depicted Gaston’s wife Suzanne, son Claude, Josse’s wife Mathilde and their son Jean in the opulent family living room. The painting is an exceptional example of Vuillard’s intimiste style. In this touching moment Suzanne covers her face and leans over to share a tender moment with her son, while her nephew lies on the floor as her sister-in-law watches over him from the chair behind.

In the years after 1900 Vuillard dedicated himself to interior scenes such as this, using new techniques and materials to further imbue his works with an over-arching sense of intimacy and psychological complexity that is synonymous with his oeuvre. A continuation of the intimiste style of his earlier Nabis works, these compositions record the environment of his private world and personal experience, creating paintings that capture both atmosphere and feeling.

‘Confidence, les enfants Bernheim au salon’ remained in Gaston’s collection for a number of years. The painting was first shown in the 1906 Salon d’automne, the exhibition that had the year prior broken the rules of fine art, with the birth of fauvism. Gaston later exhibited this work in two exhibitions dedicated to the artist at Bernheim-Jeune in 1907 and 1938.

Vuillard was close friends with both Josse and Gaston, and created several paintings of the Bernheim family over the years, a number of which are now in museums. These include The ‘Art Dealers (The Bernheim-Jeune Brothers)’, 1912 in the Saint Louis Art Museum and of Gaston’s daughter ‘Geneviève Bernheim de Villers’, 1919-20, Museé d’Orsay, Paris.