La causette [The Chat]

La causette at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, painted in 1893, captures the intimate exchange of women in conversation — 'la causette' suggesting quiet, informal talk rather than formal discussion — within the dense, patterned domestic space that Vuillard was making his signature territory. The two figures in domestic conversation were a subject type he would return to throughout his career, the relationship between two women occupying the same intimate space providing both compositional structure and social meaning. His Edinburgh canvas was acquired as part of the Scottish National Gallery's systematic collecting of French modern painting that gave Edinburgh one of the stronger British public holdings of Post-Impressionist work. The Nabi flatness of this early canvas — figures compressed against their interior setting, their clothing merging with the decorative patterns of walls and furnishings — represents his most fully radical application of the Maurice Denis principle that painting must above all assert the sovereignty of its flat surface rather than create the illusion of depth.

The two figures are compressed against their interior setting, their clothing merging with the decorative patterns of walls and furnishings in Vuillard's characteristic early manner. Working in oil on canvas, he applies paint in dry, closely valued touches that deny depth and affirm the two-dimensional surface of the picture.