Madame Gaston Lévy and her daughter

Madame Gaston Lévy and her daughter belong to the category of double portrait — mother and child — that Vuillard painted on numerous occasions. The Lévy family were part of the Jewish bourgeois professional world of Paris that formed a significant part of Vuillard's patronage network; the Natansons, Hessels, and several of his other principal patrons came from this milieu. Depicting a mother with her daughter allowed Vuillard to pursue simultaneously the domestic portraiture he excelled at and the generational continuity within bourgeois families that gave his social world its character.

The mother and daughter create a compositional pairing structured around scale difference and the social relationship between adult and child. Vuillard integrates both figures into the domestic interior with equal attention. The handling is characteristic of his mature portrait work with careful faces and patterned surroundings.