Intérieur de maison

Intérieur de maison at the Dordrechts Museum in the Netherlands, painted in 1901, brings Vuillard's domestic interior painting to a Dutch collection that might recognize in his work an echo of a specific national tradition. The Dutch Golden Age interior — Vermeer's women at windows, de Hooch's courtyard scenes, the domestic paintings of Delft and Amsterdam — elevated the private home to a subject of supreme pictorial significance in the seventeenth century, and Vuillard's twentieth-century version of that achievement has been recognized by critics as belonging to the same tradition despite its completely different formal language. His suppression of deep space, his democratic treatment of persons and objects, and his absorption in the specific visual character of enclosed domestic environments all connect him to the Dutch masters even as his Nabi flattening and chromatic approach depart entirely from their tonal traditions. The Dordrechts Museum's acquisition of this canvas placed it within one of the historic cities of Dutch painting — Dordrecht was Albert Cuyp's city — at the intersection of two national traditions of domestic painting separated by three centuries.

The composition emphasizes the house as container — walls, floor, ceiling defining an enclosed space within which human activity occurs. The characteristic Vuillard flatness compresses this architectural depth into a pattern of overlapping rectangles.