Personnages dans un intérieur. Le choix des livres

Personnages dans un intérieur: Le choix des livres of 1896 is the companion panel to the music subject from the same suite — a domestic interior organized around the selection of books, the specific intellectual activity of choosing what to read creating a subject of cultivated bourgeois leisure. His domestic panels from the mid-1890s, commissioned for installation in private rooms, represent his most ambitious domestic subjects from this period: larger in format than his intimate cabinet works, more specifically domestic in their intended function, and more systematically decorative in their organization of color and form. The book selection subject — figures gathered around shelves or a table, their attention directed toward the choice of reading material — created a concentrated intellectual domestic scene quite different from the more dispersed activities of his sewing and tea-taking subjects. His patrons for such panels were typically cultivated Parisians for whom a painted record of the domestic activities of reading and music had genuine resonance.

The bookshelves provide a strong vertical and horizontal grid of spines across a significant portion of the canvas surface, each book a small rectangle of colour in Vuillard's characteristic mosaic approach. The figures selecting books stand before this ordered pattern field.