The two schoolboys

The Two Schoolboys of 1894 places children within a specifically public institutional setting — the school — that was quite different from the private domestic environments of his typical child subjects. French primary education in the 1890s was undergoing significant reform following the Jules Ferry laws of the early 1880s that had established mandatory, free, and secular public schooling, and the schoolboy as a subject had a specific social resonance in this context. His treatment of the two schoolboys likely applied his characteristic intimist approach to figures in an institutional setting — the children absorbed in their shared situation rather than performing for the viewer, the specific environment of their school presence (books, desks, schoolbags) creating the compositional elements of the scene. The 1894 date places this in his most formally experimental Nabi period.

The matching school uniforms of the two boys create a compositional echo — similar dark shapes separated in the picture space, their repeated forms providing a rhythmic structure. Vuillard treats the uniforms with flat dark areas that contrast with the more varied, patterned handling of the environment around them.