The doors

The Doors of 1894 makes the architectural element most fundamental to the organization of domestic space — the door as the division between rooms, between private and social, between enclosed and traversable — into a subject of concentrated formal investigation. Vuillard's interest in domestic architecture was not merely incidental to his interiors but fundamental to their meaning: the specific architectural forms of the Parisian apartment — its sequence of connected rooms, its wallpapered walls, its particular scale and proportion — were the medium through which domestic life was organized and experienced, and his paintings treated these architectural facts as seriously as the human figures within them. A canvas devoted primarily to doors — the transitions between rooms, the surfaces where different domestic environments met — shows his systematic investigation of the domestic interior as an architectural and spatial phenomenon as well as a human and social one.

The doors' geometric panels provide rectangular structure within the otherwise pattern-flattened composition — a counterpoint of straight lines and defined edges against the more irregular marks of the surrounding wallpaper, drapery, and furniture. Vuillard treats the door surfaces with varying paint density that suggests their different planes and the light falling across them.