Louis Loucheur

Louis Loucheur, painted in 1905, depicts a figure from the world of French politics and industry — Loucheur would become a significant politician in the 1910s and 1920s, serving as minister in several French governments and playing a role in the reconstruction of France after the First World War. Vuillard's portrait of him at a relatively early stage of his career — 1905, when Loucheur was in his mid-thirties — is an example of his practice of painting figures whose social and political importance grew after the portrait was made. His integration of the political figure within a domestic setting followed his invariable approach: the sitter encountered in a specific room rather than posed in a formal official environment, the domestic context giving the portrait its particular intimacy and social specificity. The contrast between the grand public career Loucheur would later have and the intimate domestic setting of this 1905 portrait is characteristic of Vuillard's insistence on the private dimension of all his subjects.

Vuillard situates the sitter within an interior setting, using the surrounding room to provide chromatic context for the figure. The portrait retains his characteristic surface unity — figure and background sharing the same tonal language — but grants the sitter's face and hands the additional descriptive attention that portraiture conventions demanded.