Les cigares

Les cigares (The Cigars) depicts a domestic or social scene with figures smoking, likely from Vuillard's mature or late period. Smoking was a common feature of the male social world he depicted — the after-dinner gathering, the study, the conversation with friends — and the cigar in particular marked a social ritual of bourgeois masculine comfort. Vuillard painted male domestic subjects with the same attentiveness he brought to the female domestic world of sewing and tea-drinking, assembling across his career a comprehensive picture of bourgeois social life in all its gendered rituals.

The thin wisps of smoke provide an atmospheric element that Vuillard treats as a delicate tonal modifier rather than a dramatic effect. The figures are set in an interior whose furnishings and walls provide the characteristic patterned background. Paint handling remains small and even across the surface.