Femme en chapeau devant un bas-relief

Femme en chapeau devant un bas-relief (Woman in a Hat before a bas-relief) of 1902 places a fashionably hatted woman before a sculptural relief — a subject that creates a dialogue between the living figure in contemporary dress and the permanent art object, both sharing the same pictorial space. His placement of figures before art works or cultural objects (the Venus of Milo reproduction in his flower still life, the figurine in his earlier still lifes) reflected his consistent interest in the dialogue between the living domestic present and the cultural artifacts that surrounded it. A woman's hat was itself a decorated, crafted object — a product of the same millinery and decorative industries that his mother's dressmaking background made familiar — and its presence before a bas-relief created a specific conversation between different kinds of human-made form, both of them organized by aesthetic intention.

The contrast between the softly observed figure and the harder-edged bas-relief behind her creates a tension between tactile surfaces that Vuillard exploits for pictorial richness. His brushwork in the hat's fabric and the stone surface deliberately echoes, linking foreground and background through similar gestural rhythms.