Le Salon de Madame Aron

Le Salon de Madame Aron from 1911, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, belongs to the sequence of commissioned portraits-of-interiors that Vuillard undertook for wealthy Parisian clients in the early twentieth century. These commissions asked him to depict not just the client but the entire domestic environment — the salon as social stage, the furnishings as self-expression. Madame Aron's salon represents the more prosperous end of the domestic world he portrayed — a contrast to the modest bourgeois apartments of his early career.

The commissioned nature of this work — made for a specific patron and setting — introduces a slightly different register of attention than his self-directed intimist panels. The salon's furnishings are rendered with more individual detail than Vuillard typically allowed, to honor the specific interior depicted.