Le Salon de Madame Aron

Le Salon de Madame Aron of 1911 documents the drawing room of Marcelle Aron — the wife of Tristan Bernard, whom Vuillard would formally portrait three years later — in a domestic interior subject that captures the specific character of a particular Paris apartment's salon. His practice of depicting specific named interiors (Madame Aron's salon, Madame Hessel's drawing room, the Bernheim apartment on avenue Henri Martin) gave his domestic subjects a documentary precision that distinguished them from generic interior subjects. The salon as the principal room of bourgeois social life — the space for receiving guests, for afternoon visits, for the social rituals that defined the household's public domestic identity — provided him with a richly furnished environment whose specific character (the furniture, the decoration, the quality of its light) was as distinctive and observable as any individual face.

The commissioned nature of this work — made for a specific patron and setting — introduces a slightly different register of attention than his self-directed intimist panels. The salon's furnishings are rendered with more individual detail than Vuillard typically allowed, to honor the specific interior depicted.