Das blaue Zimmer

Das blaue Zimmer (The Blue Room) is a German-titled work indicating it was likely produced for or acquired by a German collector. A blue room — walls or furnishings in a dominant blue — gave Vuillard an unusually cool dominant tonality for his normally warm palette. Throughout his career Vuillard was attentive to the way specific rooms had specific colour characters determined by their wallpaper, light sources, and furnishings, and a blue room would have presented him with a compositional problem quite different from the ochre and red interiors he more typically inhabited.

The cool blue dominant creates a different tonal atmosphere than most of Vuillard's domestic work, with the warm accents of skin and objects reading against the surrounding cool. The paint surface maintains his characteristic small-touch application across all elements of the composition.