La Comédie

La Comédie, painted in 1936 in glue tempera, is a late theatrical subject from Vuillard's final decade — the theatre and its social world had interested him throughout his career, both as subject matter and as a client for his large-scale decorative panels. By 1936 Vuillard was in his late sixties, and his late work shows the sustained vision of an artist who had never abandoned his fundamental preoccupations: the integration of figure and decorative environment, the muted earthy palette, the compression of domestic and social space. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours holds this glue tempera panel as an example of his late technique, in which the matte, absorbent quality of glue tempera suited his characteristic avoidance of painterly brilliance in favor of dense, quiet surface.

Vuillard's use of glue tempera in this late work produces a matte, absorbent surface particularly suited to his mosaic-like technique of small strokes in muted, earthy colors. The theatrical setting is integrated with the figures through the characteristic Intimist compression of his mature vision — the audience, the stage, and the architectural setting combined into a unified decorative field rather than a conventional spatial recession.