Jean-Édouard Vuillard was believed to have three muses throughout his artistic career — his mother, and two fascinating patrons, Misia Natanson and Lucy Hessel, whose intimate involvement and support for the artist was invaluable to his creative output. But there is a fourth, who lingers, invisible, in the sumptuous drawing rooms and boudoirs, in the mirrors and doorways of his fin de siècle Parisian world, and her name is Mnemosyne, or Memory. In the New York City Jewish Museum’s gorgeously vibrant exhibit, Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, the sense of memory, of reminiscence in every stunning detail, is always present.

Stephen Brown, the curator of this retrospective — the first major NYC exhibit in over 20 years — believes it is crucial to comprehend the artist not just for the beautiful paintings he produced, but for the subjects they captured.

“To understand Vuillard, you not only understand his patrons, his friends, his muses, but understand they were people who became his subject matter,” he said. “People are always recognizable and that relationship of both the artist’s present and the understanding of the past, that inter-relationship that you find in his work, is ultimately the thing that will guarantee his authenticity in history.”

The fact that the Jewish Museum has a history of presenting its subjects in a larger context of the Jewish experience was a point that Brown stressed in particular with this exhibit. He conceded that it was possible to see Vuillard in a different, perhaps broader light, but here the choice was made to show the almost inextricable role certain individuals played in the artist’s development.

Was this a right or wrong decision? The viewer must decide, but it is hard to imagine from Vuillard’s modest beginnings, how he would have gained entry into the greatest salons and homes in French society. Without the Natanson, Kapferer, Hessel and Blum connections (Leon Blum was the first socialist and Jew to serve as prime minister of France), it’s anyone’s guess what kind of paintings Vuillard would have produced. Portraits would have been painted surely, but not with the great insight and intuitive mastery that was Vuillard’s.

The exhibit is a journey through time. Like all good journeys, it’s a trip that only improves by getting a little lost along the way, retracing one’s steps for a second or third look. Not to be overlooked before departing is a five minute video on Vuillard and the photograph. He ultimately produced over two thousand images, which were a great tool to feed his memory when starting new works.

Vuillard’s career spanned 50 years — from playing a key role in the heart of the turn-of-the-century avant-garde to the dream-shattering German occupation of the City of Light. With over 50 paintings (a quarter that have never been seen publicly in America), prints, photographs and documents that define the key players, predominantly wealthy assimilated Jews, it is only fitting to start at the beginning.

Vuillard’s early Catholic upbringing, like that of his close painter friend Pierre Bonnard, was humble. Having lost his father at 15, his mother became his first muse and along with his sister Marie, a frequent subject. Signature themes surfaced at this early stage with a dense overlay of patterns and textures, as well as the use of windows and mirrors to both reveal and blur the objects of his brush.

In the first instance, the daily exposure to fabrics from his mother’s small dressmaking business was often present in his early works. It was not unusual for him to use whatever material happened to be within reach. Such was the case with Madame Vuillard at Table 1896-97, but already we see a masterly application of oil to cardboard. Even with the intricacy of patterns, a bold use of space prevails. This is never more evident than in Mother and Daughter Against a Red Background, 1891. Here, his early appreciation for Paul Gaugin, especially the flat asymmetrically placed silhouettes that the artist produced in Brittany during the same time period, is obvious.

One of the most intriguing uses of the mirror and its reflected powers is in an 1889 portrait of the artist with a friend, Self-Portrait with Waroquy, 1889. The faces appear muted, one step removed from the viewer, and only after close examination does it become clear that the figures are reflected in a mirror, visible in the double image of a bottle in the lower right of the canvas.

At 21, Vuillard became associated with a small group of painters who named themselves the Nabis (Les Nabis). Taking their inspiration from Gauguin and Odilon Redon, these Nabis (“prophets” in Hebrew, “enlightened” in Arabic) believed in simplified forms and color. Symbolism and dreamlike imagery captured their attention but in Vuillard’s case, the line and refinement of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec are evident as well.

Enter the second muse.

Paris was a hothouse of experimentation for painters, poets, playwrights, dancers and the Jewish financiers, collectors, and publishers who supported them. It was no accident that Vuillard’s nascent talents came to the attention of the Natanson brothers. A wealthy émigré banking family from Poland, they became the founders and editors of La Revue Blanche (copies are generously displayed for viewers’ enjoyment at the exhibit) and for 14 years, relished the contributions of not only Vuillard, but composer Claude Debussy and poets Paul Verlaine and Guillaume Apollinaire. When Thadée Natanson married the young pianist of Polish descent, Misia Godebska, Vuillard quickly became the woman’s confidante. A charming portrait of her from 1897, her mouth drawn in childish petulance, is worth noting.

Brown was quick to point out that the Revue became a hive of liberal ideals, gaining a reputation as a kind of New Jerusalem for intellectuals. When Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused and tried for treason, the publication became known as the headquarters of the “Dreyfusards.” An interesting aside from Brown was offered about the Dreyfus Affair. The museum’s chief curator, Norman Kleeblatt, mounted an important exhibition in 1987, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice. When I asked Brown earlier in our interview about the origins of the Vuillard exhibit, he said that they had been considering the Vuillard connection for some time, “In a way, with the life of Vuillard, it comes full circle. It shows an artist that emerges from that period and a milieu that was very involved in that.”

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