Jane Renouardt

Jane Renouardt was a French actress and socialite known for her roles in boulevard theatre and later in early cinema. Vuillard's portrait of her belongs to his extensive practice of painting theatrical and social celebrities in the 1920s and 1930s, when his role as a portraitist of the Parisian establishment was firmly established. Theatrical personalities occupied a specific social position in Parisian life — public figures who also had access to private social worlds — and Vuillard depicted several of them with the same domestic intimacy he brought to his portraits of private patrons.

Vuillard sets the actress in an interior that reflects her social milieu, the furnishings and decorative objects providing his characteristic patterned ground. The face is painted with the attentive specificity demanded by a portrait commission while being integrated into the overall decorative surface.