Atelier de Couture de Madame Vuillard

Atelier de Couture de Madame Vuillard, painted in 1892, depicts the corset workshop his mother ran from their shared apartment — the space that was simultaneously domestic interior and place of work, providing Vuillard with his most characteristic and personally significant subject matter. By 1892 Vuillard was at the height of his Nabi Intimist development, and this workshop interior demonstrates the formal compression at its most radical: the seamstresses absorbed into the fabrics and surfaces of their workplace, barely distinguishable from the materials they worked with. The Nabis took Gauguin's flat Synthetism and applied it to intimate modern subjects, and Vuillard's sewing workshop gave the movement its most socially grounded subject — domestic labor observed without sentimentality in the space of its actual performance.

Vuillard's Intimist technique reaches its most compressed expression in these workshop interiors — figure and textile, worker and fabric, nearly indistinguishable in the dense mosaic of small strokes in ochre, rust, brown, and grey. The sewing workshop's fabrics and the women's clothing merge in a unified surface of domestic material that makes the distinction between person and product formally irrelevant, a formal statement about the absorption of labor into its own products.