Young Woman in Bed

Painted in 1894 and held at the Brooklyn Museum, this intimate scene of a young woman in bed belongs to Vuillard's extended exploration of feminine domestic space in the mid-1890s. Bedrooms — private, enclosed, exclusively intimate — offered Vuillard the most concentrated version of the domestic world he sought to render. The figure is presented without idealization: a woman in an ordinary domestic situation, her surroundings as present as she is. The 1894 date places this work at the height of the Nabi period, when the group's decorative principles and their debt to Japonisme and symbolism were most fully articulated.

Patterned bedding and wallpaper form a layered, enveloping surface that nearly absorbs the figure within it. The palette of rose, cream, and warm ochre creates a domestic warmth. Flat colour zones are deployed with characteristic Nabi restraint of illusionistic space.