La Fenêtre ouverte [The Open Window]

La Fenêtre ouverte at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, painted in 1915, revisits one of Vuillard's most persistent compositional motifs — the open window as the threshold between the domestic interior and the outside world. The First World War had already been underway for a year when he made this canvas, and though Vuillard at fifty-five was too old for active service, the conflict fundamentally altered the social world he depicted — his male subjects departed for the front, the domestic world contracted around the women and elderly men who remained. His window compositions have a special resonance in wartime: the aperture through which outdoor light enters looks out on a world transformed by violence, and the warm interior within which the painter worked becomes a refuge rather than merely a convenient subject. His treatment of the division between inside and outside, between the pattern-rich intimacy of the domestic and the cooler, spatially indeterminate exterior, is among his most characteristic compositional inventions, explored with fresh variation throughout his career from the earliest Nabi interiors to his late works.

The open window divides the composition between the warm interior and the cooler light of the world beyond. Vuillard renders the interior furnishings with closely valued warm tones while the exterior is treated with broader, cooler brushwork that evokes diffuse outdoor light flooding through the frame.