Sewing Party at Loctudy

Sewing Party at Loctudy of 1912 places a group of women sewing together in the specific setting of the Breton coastal village of Loctudy in Finistère — a domestic gathering scene set within Vuillard's social world of summer visits with bourgeois Parisian friends. The sewing party as a subject had a long tradition in European genre painting — Vermeer's domestic women, Chardin's kitchen workers, the Impressionist gatherings of female sitters — but Vuillard's treatment brought the concentrated group of needleworkers into the specific social world of the early twentieth-century Parisian bourgeoisie. The gathering of several women with their sewing at a social occasion combined his documentary interest in female labor with the social scene of collective bourgeois leisure, creating a subject that was simultaneously a formal exercise and a social record. His treatment of the group within the specific architectural environment of the Loctudy house would have required different compositional strategies than his single-figure domestic studies, the relationships between the several sewing women creating a spatial and social complexity he resolved through his characteristic chromatic unification.

The multiple figures bent over their work create a complex of concentrated forms that Vuillard organizes across the canvas with his characteristic attention to the interplay of figure and setting. The domestic interior with its particular light is evoked through the treatment of walls, floors, and furnishings as equally weighted elements in the overall pictorial fabric.