Sur le sofa

Sur le sofa of 1892 belongs to Vuillard's earliest Nabi period — the figure reclining on a sofa providing one of the simplest and most direct of his domestic subjects, a person at rest within the enclosed domestic space. The sofa as a domestic object was as rich with association as any piece of furniture in the bourgeois apartment: the site of leisure, of rest after the day's activities, of the afternoon reading or conversation that structured domestic time. His treatment of the reclining figure on the sofa applied his Nabi method — the figure absorbed into the sofa's upholstery and the surrounding domestic environment through his characteristic compression and patterning — to a subject that combined the intimate with the casual in a way entirely characteristic of his domestic program. The 1892 date places this canvas in the concentrated period of his most radical formal development, when his Nabi training was being applied with the greatest experimental energy to all his domestic subjects.

The upholstered sofa surface and the figure's clothing are treated with comparable detail, creating Vuillard's signature blurring of human presence and domestic object. The tonal range is warm and restricted. The paint handling treats the upholstery pattern with the same mosaic touch as the surrounding room.