Fitting, actor in her wardrobe

Fitting, actor in her wardrobe, painted in 1892 on panel and now at the Museum of Fine Arts of Reims, is one of Vuillard's earliest surviving backstage theater subjects — painted at a moment when his connections to the Parisian avant-garde theater world were at their most active. The Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, founded by Lugné-Poe in 1893 (this canvas may anticipate that founding or derive from related theatrical environments), became the central venue for Symbolist drama in Paris, and Vuillard's involvement with its visual culture — designing programs, attending performances, painting theater subjects — was integral to his Nabi identity. Backstage scenes offered him concentrated domestic spaces of a specific kind: the dressing room with its mirrors, costumes, and artificial light, the performers in various states of undress between their public and private identities. The panel support makes this an unusual material choice within his oeuvre, and the 1892 date places it in his most formally experimental phase, when the Nabi influence was most intense.

The panel support and early date make this a tighter, more exploratory work than his mature cardboard pieces. The artificial backstage light creates localized illumination that Vuillard uses to organize the compressed space, with the wardrobe's hanging costumes and the actor's partially dressed figure merging into a complex decorative field.