Woman in Green

Woman in Green from 1909 at the Harvard Art Museums shows Vuillard in the middle of his transition from radical Nabi flatness toward a somewhat more conventional, though still deeply personal, mature style. A woman in green against a green interior creates the chromatic near-disappearance Vuillard found endlessly fascinating — the figure absorbed into an environment of matching hue, visible through subtle tonal and pattern variations rather than through strong color contrast. Harvard's French collection, built through connections to the early twentieth-century Parisian market, holds this canvas as part of its Vuillard holdings.

The green-on-green composition demands exceptional sensitivity to tonal and pattern variation within a single chromatic range — Vuillard must differentiate figure from environment through the subtlest means available. He achieves this through variations in stroke texture, slight shifts in color temperature within the green range, and the pattern of the woman's clothing against the background surface.