Personnages dans un intérieur. Le choix des livres

Personnages dans un intérieur. Le choix des livres (Figures in an Interior. Choosing Books) depicts the ritual of selecting books from a library or bookshelf, a scene of intellectual life in the bourgeois interior that Vuillard depicted in several variants. The book as object, and the library as room, were markers of cultural aspiration in the French bourgeois home, and Vuillard treated them with the same affectionate precision he brought to the sewing box and the tea service. The act of choosing — standing before a shelf, hesitating, reaching — offered a figural action different from the static seated figures of many of his interiors.

The bookshelves provide a strong vertical and horizontal grid of spines across a significant portion of the canvas surface, each book a small rectangle of colour in Vuillard's characteristic mosaic approach. The figures selecting books stand before this ordered pattern field.