La Salle d'étude aux Pavillons

La Salle d'étude aux Pavillons, painted around 1910, is one of Vuillard's more overtly institutional interior subjects — a study room, presumably in a school or civic building, furnished with the functional austerity of a public rather than domestic space. Vuillard's instinct was consistently for the private interior — mother's workroom, bourgeois salon, intimate dining room — and when he ventured into more public settings he brought the same close, pattern-focused observation. The work demonstrates that his Intimist vision was ultimately a method rather than a subject, applicable anywhere the eye found pattern in enclosed space.

The study room's furniture and walls are rendered with Vuillard's characteristic compression of spatial depth, the institutional setting becoming almost as intimately patterned as his domestic interiors. He deploys a cooler, more neutral palette than his salon or bedroom scenes, appropriate to the functional character of the space.