Interior

Interior of 1893 at the Yale University Art Gallery is among Vuillard's earliest works to fully realize the Nabi program of the picture as a flat decorative surface. He had absorbed the theoretical framework from Maurice Denis's 1890 article 'Définition du Néo-Traditionnisme,' which articulated the Nabi conviction that painting must assert the sovereignty of its own flat surface and color relationships over any illusionistic claim, and he applied this doctrine to the domestic interior with a conviction none of his Nabi colleagues quite matched. The figure within the room is absorbed into the room's patterns — clothing, wallpaper, furniture sharing the same visual weight — so that the composition functions almost as an abstract arrangement of color zones that happens to contain a legible figure. Yale's French collection includes important acquisitions from the early twentieth century when American universities were beginning to collect European modern art with seriousness. This early Interior documents the formation of Vuillard's mature style at its most experimental moment.

The Nabi principle of the flat surface covered in colors arranged in a certain order is visible in the way pattern and figure compete for visual attention. Perspective is minimal, the room compressed into overlapping areas of fabric, wallpaper, and skin.