Mme Vuillard in a Set Designer's Studio

Painted in 1893 and held at the Metropolitan Museum, this work explicitly connects Vuillard's domestic intimisme to his parallel career as a theatre set designer. The studio of a theatrical designer was the professional domestic space for this particular aspect of Parisian artistic culture. Mme Vuillard — his mother Marie, his constant domestic subject — appears in the context of this professional environment, bridging the two worlds most central to Vuillard's early career. The Nabi group were deeply involved with the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre of Lugné-Poe, designing sets, programmes, and posters; Vuillard's intimiste paintings and his theatrical work fed each other formally and thematically.

The studio space is rendered with the same compressive patterning Vuillard applied to domestic interiors: design drawings, props, and materials form interlocking zones of pattern. His mother's figure merges into this professional environment with characteristic seamlessness.