Modèle se coiffant dans l'atelier

Modèle se coiffant dans l'atelier of 1916 is a studio subject — a model arranging her hair within the studio rather than a domestic room — that connects to the long tradition of the woman at her toilette while relocating it in the professional painter's working environment. His studio subjects from the 1910s show him occasionally documenting the professional space of his own practice — the models, objects, and light conditions of the studio itself — rather than the purely domestic environments of his more characteristic work. The hair-arranging gesture, a form of self-care and self-presentation, appears in various forms across his career, and his 1916 version places it specifically within the studio context. The wartime date connects this to the other studio and domestic subjects he continued to paint through the war years as a form of maintained attention to the private and the intimate in the shadow of public catastrophe.

The studio setting is treated with greater spatial openness than Vuillard's domestic interiors, the practical working space of the atelier providing a different background texture. The figure's raised arms and turned head create a contrapposto action that Vuillard renders with his characteristic simplified form language.