Sketch for 'Mme Jean Trarieux and her Daughters'

Sketch for 'Mme Jean Trarieux and her Daughters' of 1912 documents Vuillard's working process for a commissioned portrait — the preparatory study that preceded the larger finished work and that captures a quality of spontaneous observation often more vivid than the resolved commission. His sketches and studies for portrait subjects show the same quality of intimate attention as his finished works but with a directness and economy that the longer work of the finished canvas sometimes moderated. Madame Trarieux and her daughters belonged to the cultivated Parisian bourgeoisie of his social world, and the family portrait in a domestic setting was among his most characteristic commission types — multiple figures in a shared domestic environment, the relationships between them conveyed through proximity and shared chromatic atmosphere rather than through formal compositional arrangements. The sketch status of this canvas places it in the preparatory tradition that even committed plein-air painters maintained alongside their exhibited work.

As a sketch, this work is more freely handled than the finished portrait would be, with Vuillard establishing the figures' positions and the interior's general color character in broad, exploratory strokes. The compositional structure—how the women and the surrounding room relate—is worked out here with an openness absent from his more resolved paintings.