At the Board Game

At the Board Game at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt depicts figures concentrated on a tabletop game — the specific focus of players absorbed in strategic thought giving Vuillard the subject type he consistently favored: people entirely occupied with an activity other than being observed. Board games had their own tradition in European genre painting, from seventeenth-century Dutch card and chess players through nineteenth-century bourgeois interior scenes, but Vuillard's version refuses the narrative or moralizing implications of most game-playing scenes. His figures are simply playing, their concentration on the game creating the same quality of domestic absorption he found in sewing, reading, and coffee-drinking. The Städel Museum's French collection, which includes important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings alongside its German and Dutch old master strength, represents the Frankfurt institution's engagement with French modernism that intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His small, even brush touch treats the game board, the tablecloth, and the players' concentrated faces with equal painterly care.

The overhead light source creates a concentrated illumination on the game board, which functions as a compositional focal point amid the surrounding domestic clutter. Vuillard maintains his small-touch brushwork throughout, treating the tablecloth pattern and the concentrated faces with equal painterly care.