In Bed

In Bed is among Vuillard's most celebrated early works, dating from around 1891 when he was at the height of his Nabi period. The radical flattening of the figure into the bedclothes — head and white sheets nearly indistinguishable — reflects his intense study of Japanese woodblock prints and Gauguin's synthetism. The intimate domestic subject, his mother or a woman in the family apartment, anchors a formal experiment that verges on abstraction. At this moment Vuillard was among the most formally advanced painters in Paris, pursuing a reductive visual language that placed him alongside Bonnard and Maurice Denis in the Nabi circle.

The composition is almost entirely white, with the figure compressed into a pattern of horizontal bands, wrinkles, and colour inflections across the bedding. Vuillard suppresses three-dimensional form almost entirely; the face emerges only as a slight warm tone against the surrounding white. The handling is remarkably restrained for a work of such extreme formal ambition.