Dinnertime

Painted in 1889, this early dinner scene is among Vuillard's first surviving domestic interior subjects and predates his Nabi transformation. Dinnertime — the family gathered at the table — became one of his most enduring subjects, and this early example shows the theme before it was inflected with the decorative flatness of his mature style. At 21, Vuillard was working in the conventional tonal realism of his academic training; the intimiste treatment of shared meals as psychologically charged, spatially compressed events would come only after his encounter with the Nabi circle in the early 1890s. MoMA's early acquisition of this work reflects its importance in the Vuillard chronology.

The early academic handling employs conventional tonal modelling and spatial recession. The domestic interior is lit from an indeterminate source. The figures are more conventionally rendered than in the mature Nabi works, with clear spatial separation between them.