Madame Hessel dans sa chambre au Château des Clayes

Madame Hessel dans sa chambre au Château des Clayes of 1930 is a late addition to the sustained pictorial biography of Lucy Hessel that constitutes one of the most extensive series of portraits of a single subject in modern French painting. By 1930 Lucy had been his closest companion for three decades — she had become the emotional center of his life after his mother's death in 1928 — and his portraits of her continued to document her presence in the specific rooms of her various residences with the same quality of attentive observation he had brought to earlier subjects. Her bedroom at the Château des Clayes was a particularly intimate setting, the private sanctuary within the country house providing the most enclosed of domestic environments for this late portrait. His 1930 style — spatially more open than his early Nabi work but still characterized by his small-touch surface and democratic attention to all elements of the visual field — gave the portrait a quality of late-life tenderness alongside its continued formal rigor.

The bedroom setting provides Vuillard with the densely furnished, patterned space of his richest domestic canvases. The bed, dresser, and personal objects accumulate around the figure of Lucy. The palette is warm and enclosed, the light domestic and private. All surfaces are treated with Vuillard's characteristic equalising brushwork.