The Newspaper

The Newspaper at the Phillips Collection in Washington, painted in 1897, depicts a figure absorbed in reading — one of the recurring domestic activities Vuillard documented throughout his career as instances of private concentration within the social domestic world. The newspaper reader was a characteristically modern subject: Daumier had made Parisian newspaper readers a recurring motif of his lithographic satire, and the figure absorbed in the daily press represented both the modern urban citizen's connection to public life and the private withdrawal of the individual into personal absorption even within shared social space. Vuillard's treatment refuses the social commentary of Daumier: the newspaper reader is simply someone engaged in a familiar domestic activity, the large paper spread creating a significant formal element within the composition — its grey-white surface providing a quiet zone against which figure and surrounding environment are set. The Phillips Collection's intimate installation, designed by its founder Duncan Phillips to create a domestic experience of viewing art, provides an appropriate context for this characteristically intimate Vuillard subject.

The large newspaper spread functions as a compositional element, its grey-white surface providing a flat, relatively neutral zone against which the figure's face and the surrounding domestic furnishings are set. Vuillard's characteristic pattern of room fittings surrounds the absorbed reader.