L'interrogatoire du prisonnier

L'interrogatoire du prisonnier (The Interrogation of the Prisoner) of 1917 is one of Vuillard's most unusual wartime subjects — apparently depicting a formal interrogation scene rather than the domestic subjects that formed virtually his entire output. The First World War's disruption of the civilian world occasionally pushed him toward subjects outside his domestic program, including the Lyon factory commission and this apparently military or judicial subject. The interrogation setting — a figure subjected to official questioning, the power dynamic of state authority over individual — was entirely foreign to the enclosed domestic world of his intimism, and his treatment would have required formal adaptations quite different from his typical approaches. Whether this canvas depicted an actual wartime interrogation or a theatrical or fictional scene is unclear from the title alone, but its presence in his 1917 output documents the way the war occasionally pulled his subjects outside his domestic territory.

The dramatic subject would have required Vuillard to work with a different compositional logic from his domestic scenes — stronger contrasts, more emphatic spatial relationships between interrogator and prisoner. The available evidence suggests he approached even this unusual subject with his characteristic restraint in tonal contrast.