Breakfast

Breakfast at the National Gallery of Art, painted in 1894, is one of Vuillard's characteristic domestic interior scenes — the morning meal as occasion for an intimate study of figures absorbed in their own worlds within the pattern-saturated environment of a bourgeois Paris apartment. Breakfast scenes carried a tradition from Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting through nineteenth-century genre, but Vuillard strips the subject of narrative and anecdote, treating the meal primarily as a pretext for organizing color and pattern across the picture surface. The figures — likely his mother and possibly a relative — are barely distinguished from the table and the wall behind them.

Vuillard's treatment of the breakfast table dissolves the boundary between the objects on it — cups, dishes, food — and the surrounding environment, treating everything with the same small, varied marks. The warm morning light is suggested through color temperature rather than through cast shadows or strong directional illumination.