Marthe Mellot

Marthe Mellot was an actress associated with the Nabis' theatrical circle, particularly with Lugne-Poe's Theatre de l'Oeuvre where Symbolist plays by Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Jarry were staged. Vuillard painted her in 1891 when their social and professional worlds overlapped most intensely. The Musee d'Orsay holds this and the companion Marthe Mellot en Bleu, enabling comparison between two portraits of the same subject. Mellot's theatrical identity would have brought a different register of performance and self-presentation to the sitting than the domestic subjects Vuillard usually painted, and his response to this difference shaped how he constructed her pictorial presence.

A theatrical subject in Vuillard's early Nabi mode required him to manage the tension between his flattening stylistic tendencies and the social expectation of recognisable likeness. He works to make Mellot's presence felt as a personality while still absorbing her into the characteristic pattern of her surroundings.