Vuillard's Room at the Château des Clayes

Vuillard's Room at the Château des Clayes of 1932, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the painter in his late sixties turning his intimist attention on his own private space within the country house that had become a second home. The self-reflexive subject — the artist's own room, his books and objects, the particular quality of light through his window — invites comparison with the long tradition of the artist's studio self-portrait, but Vuillard's version refuses the self-conscious artfulness of that genre: it is a room, rendered with the same careful attention he brought to any interior, the fact of its being his own room registering only as a slight intensification of the documentary impulse. His late handling at the Château des Clayes shows a style more relaxed and spatially open than his early Nabi work, the radical flatness of 1891-95 giving way to a more conventionally atmospheric treatment of space, though the characteristic small-mark surface and the democratic attention to all elements within the visual field remained constant. The Art Institute of Chicago's Vuillard holdings document the American institutional collecting of his work that intensified after World War II.

Executed on paper in a technique combining distemper and gouache-like applications, the work renders the room's furnishings in warm, diffused light. Vuillard's late handling is less pattern-dense than his 1890s work, with greater spatial recession and a more relaxed, almost nostalgic integration of personal objects within a lived space.