Intérieur de maison

Intérieur de maison from 1901, held at the Dordrechts Museum in the Netherlands, shows Vuillard's domestic interiors reaching a Dutch audience that might have recognized something familiar in his attention to the interior as subject. The Dutch Golden Age tradition of domestic painting — Vermeer, de Hooch, Janssens — also treated the interior as worthy of the highest artistic attention, though with very different methods. Vuillard was certainly aware of this tradition, and critics have noted an elective affinity between his interiors and the Dutch masters despite the radically different chromatic approach.

The composition emphasizes the house as container — walls, floor, ceiling defining an enclosed space within which human activity occurs. The characteristic Vuillard flatness compresses this architectural depth into a pattern of overlapping rectangles.