Roussel à la mèche noire

Roussel à la mèche noire (Roussel with the Black Lock) is a portrait of Ker-Xavier Roussel, who married Vuillard's sister Marie in 1893 and remained among his closest friends and artistic companions for decades. Roussel, a fellow Nabi painter who developed a distinctive mythological-landscape style after his Nabi period, is identified in the title by a specific physical characteristic — the black lock of hair — making this a personally intimate document rather than a formal commissioned portrait. Vuillard depicted Roussel informally multiple times, and these works record the texture of a sustained creative friendship.

The informal portrait is handled with the directness of a work made for personal rather than commercial purposes, the sitter's characteristic feature identified in the title and observed in the painting. The background is relatively simple, allowing the portrait character to assert itself without the elaborate domestic setting of Vuillard's commissioned works.