PARLOR MUSIC.(artist Edouard Vuillard, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

Edouard Vuillard, who is the subject of a huge retrospective of paintings, drawings, prints, decorative projects, and photographs at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., was one of the great fin-de-siecle neurotics who established self-conscious subjectivity as a standard spiritual appliance of twentieth-century culture. He was also the leading homebody among modern masters, a nervous Parisian mama's boy whose intimate subject matter and love of decor extoll the bourgeois nest. I have often thought that Vuillard is absurdly underrated. The density of emotion, the subtle beauty, and the excruciating sense of the eros of private life in his paintings can make other twentieth-century artists seem like louts. I've looked forward to a retrospective like this one (it runs until April 20th) for some time, hoping that it would bring Vuillard's achievement into focus and make firm judgments possible. No such luck. Greater familiarity with this artist makes one's assessment of him more tentative rather than less. His best pictures exude a hypersensitive, ambiguous aura of grace. When you are under their spell, you may shudder at the gaucherie of ever wanting something more definite. Even then, however, there is something not all there about him.

Vuillard was born in 1868, the son of a former military man and a corset-maker. His father died when he was fifteen, and the dominant figures of his early life were his maternal grandmother, his mother, and his older sister Marie. He called them his "muses."He continued to live with his mother, whom he adored, and to portray her again and again, until her death, in 1928, when he was sixty. His love life, such as it was, centered on two married, high-powered art patrons, Misia Natanson and Lucy Hessel. A thin-faced, bearded man, he was chronically insecure about his looks and his capacities. It was only after four tries that he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in 1887. He formed lifelong friendships with the dandyish minor symbolist painter Kerr-Xavier Roussel and with Pierre Bonnard--his twin in art-history books, another "intimist"who housebroke modern aesthetics. Vuillard stands out for the richness of his early, symbolist works, which retained resources of reality-describing naturalism while anticipating the all-out emotionality of Expressionism.

In the eighteen-nineties, Vuillard was active in avant-garde theatre, designing sets, posters, and programs for plays by, among others, Ibsen and Maeterlinck. In 1894, he created a green gauze scrim for the symbolist play "La Gardienne,"by Henri de Regnier. The backdrop behind the veil, an appalled critic wrote, "showed a dream landscape, blue trees, purple ground, a mauve palace, a Puvis de Chavannes fresco imitated by a color-blind baby."From 1897 on, Vuillard was a prolific photographer of his friends and family. The exhibition reveals this little-known aspect of his career in a large selection of casual-seeming photographs, aptly titled "The Intentional Snapshot,"that evoke Ibsen's unreassuring naturalism with whiffs of spooky Maeterlinck.

Vuillard did his most astonishing work in the early and mid-nineties, in paintings of interiors that often include his mother and Marie. In the famous "Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist"(1893), Mme. Vuillard sits solidly in a black dress while the painfully thin Marie, who is standing off to the side in a patterned dress against hyperactively patterned wallpaper, bends, as if to squeeze herself into the frame. A distorted bureau in the background looms like an oncoming truck. Only Vuillard's contemporary Edvard Munch could generate such psychological resonance in figure compositions. Related works include "The Conversation"(1891-92), in which Marie grabs a kitchen chair, as if in defense against her mother's massive presence. It is difficult to tell whether the artist was disturbed or perversely delighted by the strain between the two women, who were both devoted to him. Elevating the almost caricatural "Conversation"are sonorous tones of yellow, ochre, and black. Slow-acting, eloquent color was Vuillard's forte, reinforced by intricate, nubbly paint textures. A sort of dilated gaze, finding as much expressiveness in the details of carefully furnished rooms as in the people who inhabit them, charges every ...