Le malade imaginaire

Le malade imaginaire at the Kunsthalle Bremen, painted in 1912, takes its title from Molière's classic comedy about Argan, the hypochondriac who imagines himself dying while everyone around him tries to manage his obsession. Whether Vuillard was depicting an actual scene from a theatrical production or using the Molière title metaphorically for a domestic scene of real or imagined illness is not clear from the work itself, but his connections to the Parisian theatrical world — through his long friendship with the actress Marthe Mellot and his association with the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre — made theatrical subjects a natural extension of his domestic ones. The figure in the room, surrounded by the paraphernalia of domestic sickness, occupies the kind of intimate interior he had been painting for two decades — illness as the condition that returns the mobile social being to the bed-bound domestic world, creating the enclosed, concentrated situation he found most congenial as a subject.

The interior scene of the supposed invalid shows Vuillard's mature handling — richer in texture and more spatially coherent than his 1890s work while maintaining his fundamental approach of treating figures and their environments as equally weighted pictorial elements. The warm, lamplit interior creates a specific atmospheric quality through carefully calibrated color temperature.