Le Wagon de métro - I

Le Wagon de métro I of 1908 is an exceptional subject within Vuillard's oeuvre — the Paris metro carriage as an enclosed social space entirely different from the domestic interiors that formed his usual territory. The Paris métro had opened in 1900 in time for the Exposition Universelle, and by 1908 it was a familiar feature of Parisian life — an underground enclosed space where different social classes were temporarily compressed together in a way that the stratified surface life of the city kept separate. For Vuillard, the métro carriage offered a specific kind of enclosed social space: not the private domestic interior but a public communal enclosure, the passengers sharing the carriage with the involuntary intimacy of public transport. His treatment of this democratic urban subject would have applied his domestic compressed-space methods to the specific visual character of a moving public carriage — the overhead lights, the pressed figures, the glimpsed faces of strangers.

The tunnel lighting of the Métro creates a uniform, directionless illumination that Vuillard renders without the warm domestic light of his interiors. The parallel benches and the proximity of anonymous figures create a different compositional situation from his home interiors. The handling is relatively direct and economical.