Model Seated in a Chair, Combing Her Hair

Painted in 1903 in oil and held at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, this work shows a model seated in a chair combing her hair—an intimate toilette scene in the tradition that runs from Degas's bathers to Bonnard's nudes in the bathroom. For Vuillard, who rarely depicted professional models (preferring to paint women he knew), this figure in a chair represents a more formal figure study, the act of hair-combing providing a pose of absorbed self-attention that suits his preference for non-theatrical figure subjects.

The seated figure fills the picture's intimate format, the hair-combing gesture creating a characteristic triangular composition with the raised arms. Vuillard's oil handling describes the model's form through warm flesh tones that dissolve into the surrounding chair and interior, consistent with his integration of figure and setting even in formal figure studies.