Jane Renouardt

Jane Renouardt of 1926 depicts a theatrical actress who moved in the same Parisian social world as the theatrical and literary figures Vuillard had been documenting for decades. His theatrical subjects — from the early backstage scenes of the 1890s through the portraits of Marthe Mellot, Yvonne Printemps, and Sacha Guitry — formed a sustained parallel to his domestic and portrait work, the theatrical world and the bourgeois domestic world overlapping constantly in the Parisian social environment he inhabited. Renouardt's portrait would have followed his invariable approach: the actress encountered within a specific domestic setting, her theatrical public persona giving way to the private domestic presence that his intimist method consistently sought. His 1926 handling shows the mature fluency of his late portrait style, rich in atmospheric observation without the formal radicalism of his early Nabi work.

Vuillard sets the actress in an interior that reflects her social milieu, the furnishings and decorative objects providing his characteristic patterned ground. The face is painted with the attentive specificity demanded by a portrait commission while being integrated into the overall decorative surface.