Child Playing: Annette Roussel in a Front of a Wooden Chair

Child Playing: Annette Roussel in a Front of a Wooden Chair of 1900 captures the painter's niece Annette — the daughter of his sister Marie and her husband Ker-Xavier Roussel — in the specific physical vocabulary of a small child's relationship to furniture. Annette Roussel appeared in many of Vuillard's domestic subjects from the turn of the century as his extended family became part of his domestic subject world alongside his mother. The child's relationship to adult furniture — the scale disproportion creating specific postures as a small body negotiates a chair designed for adults — gave him the particular kind of unstaged, physically specific subject he consistently preferred over posed subjects. His treatment of children had the same equality of vision as his treatment of adults: Annette is not sentimentalized or made conventionally charming but observed with the same attentive seriousness as any adult figure, her physical relationship to the wooden chair rendered with the same formal precision as any adult's relationship to their domestic environment.

The child's small figure is set against the larger structure of the chair, which Vuillard renders with the same careful attention he gives the child. The scale relationship creates a compositional asymmetry that conveys childhood proportions without sentimentality. The handling is relatively small and careful throughout.