Marthe Mellot en bleu

Marthe Mellot en Bleu — Marthe Mellot in Blue — is the colour-defined companion to the Musee d'Orsay's other Mellot portrait, where the blue of the actress's dress becomes the primary pictorial fact of the painting. Vuillard's tendency to name works by the dominant colour of a garment rather than by subject or figure reflects his Nabi conviction that chromatic relationships were the true content of painting. The blue dress placed against whatever interior he painted her in would have generated colour vibrations that interested him independently of the human subject, yet Mellot's theatrical personality gives the work an additional layer of social and cultural meaning.

The blue dress is almost certainly the compositional anchor around which Vuillard organised the surrounding colours. He identifies the complementary and analogous relationships that the blue generated with wallpaper, floor, and other fabric colours, using these relationships to give the painting its coherence.