Salon Natanson

Salon Natanson from 1897, held at the Kunsthaus Zürich, depicts the apartment of Thadée and Misia Natanson, who were among Vuillard's most important patrons and social connections. Thadée Natanson co-founded the Revue Blanche, the literary and artistic journal central to Nabi culture, and his wife Misia became one of the great cultural figures of Parisian life — a friend of Proust, Ravel, and Diaghilev. The Natanson salon was a gathering point for the artistic avant-garde of the 1890s, and Vuillard's painting of it is also a document of that milieu. The Kunsthaus Zürich, one of Switzerland's finest art institutions, holds this within its strong Post-Impressionist collection.

The salon interior is rendered with the same chromatic attention Vuillard gave to modest bourgeois apartments — the elegance of the setting is expressed through the quality and variety of pattern rather than any conventional vocabulary of luxury. Space is compressed in characteristic fashion.