La Salle d'étude aux Pavillons

La Salle d'étude aux Pavillons of 1910 depicts a study room at Les Pavillons — a country property associated with bourgeois Parisian family life — creating a subject at the intersection of his interest in domestic interiors and his occasional documentation of institutional spaces within private life. The study room with its specific equipment of learning and concentration — books, writing surfaces, the particular quality of light needed for reading and study — was a domestic space with its own character quite different from the more social rooms of the dining room or salon. His treatment of the study room applied his intimist method to a space of concentrated private activity, the figures (if any) absorbed in study rather than in the social rituals of domestic leisure.

The study room's furniture and walls are rendered with Vuillard's characteristic compression of spatial depth, the institutional setting becoming almost as intimately patterned as his domestic interiors. He deploys a cooler, more neutral palette than his salon or bedroom scenes, appropriate to the functional character of the space.