The Visitor

The Visitor of around 1900, at the Kunsthaus Zürich, depicts one of the quiet social encounters that structured bourgeois life in fin-de-siècle Paris — the formal call, the visitor received in a private interior, the domestic performance of social cordiality. Vuillard's vision of the interior as a stage for private social life was formed by his own position as a permanent guest in many of the households he painted, an observer simultaneously inside and slightly apart from the social rituals he documented. The Kunsthaus Zürich holds a significant collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modernist painting, and this Vuillard belongs to a group of works that address the social dimension of the interior rather than the more solitary domestic absorption of his mother paintings.

The composition arranges the figures within the patterned interior in a way that makes the room's furnishings as visually active as the people, the visitor and host almost camouflaged within the decorative complexity of the setting. Vuillard applies paint in small patches of warm and cool colour that create textural continuity across both figures and background.