Woman in a Striped Dress

Woman in a Striped Dress from 1895 at the National Gallery of Art shows Vuillard using the vertical rhythm of the dress's stripes as a formal element in dialogue with the surrounding wallpaper pattern — a characteristic Nabi device of putting competing pattern systems in productive tension. By 1895 Vuillard had been working through the intimist program for five years and was deploying its formal strategies with full confidence and inventiveness. The dress's stripes merge with and differentiate from the surrounding patterned surface in a way that makes the figure both present and absorbed within her environment.

The striped dress provides a strong vertical rhythm that the painter sets against the horizontal or all-over patterns of the surrounding interior. Vuillard renders the stripes with subtle variations of color within each band — not mechanically striped but showing slight tonal variations of fabric seen in real light — while the surrounding wallpaper is handled with complementary decorative complexity.