Mme Henri-Xavier Fontaine

Mme Henri-Xavier Fontaine was the wife of a French official or professional, and Vuillard's portrait of her belongs to his extensive output of domestic portraits of Parisian bourgeois women painted primarily from the 1900s onward. As his early Nabi avant-gardism gave way to a more socially embedded practice, Vuillard was in constant demand as a portrait painter from the Parisian professional and artistic milieu. These portraits required him to balance his formal instinct to dissolve figures into their settings with the practical need to produce a recognisable and flattering likeness.

The sitter is placed in an interior with furnishings that Vuillard treats as an integrated decorative field. The face is rendered with greater specificity than the surrounding pattern elements. The palette is warm and carefully balanced to produce an effect of comfortable domestic elegance appropriate to the commissioning context.