Antoinette David-Weill and her nephew Maurice Lambiotte in Mareil-le-Guyon

This scene of Antoinette David-Weill and her nephew at Mareil-le-Guyon belongs to Vuillard's extensive body of work for the wealthy Parisian Jewish banking families — the Bernheim-Jeunes, the Hessels, the David-Weills — who were among his most important patrons in the early twentieth century. These commissioned portraits in domestic or country-house settings formed a substantial part of his mature output and are an invaluable record of the cultivated haute-bourgeoisie of the Third Republic. The Piscine museum in Roubaix holds this through its collections of northern French decorative and fine arts.

The glue tempera medium gives the work a matt, tapestry-like quality suited to the domestic decorative context for which many of Vuillard's patron commissions were intended. The outdoor setting at the family's country property places the subjects in a spacious light quite different from his characteristic dense domestic interiors.