Madame Arthur Fontaine in a Pink Shawl

Painted in 1904 in oil and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this portrait of Madame Arthur Fontaine—wife of the prominent arts administrator and collector Arthur Fontaine—typifies Vuillard's mature approach to commissioned portraiture. He was sought out by the Parisian cultural elite to paint domestic portraits that captured not just likeness but the ambient quality of cultivated domestic life, and Madame Fontaine's pink shawl becomes both a coloristic focus and a marker of her comfortable cultural milieu. The Fontaine family was deeply embedded in Paris's artistic and musical world.

The pink shawl provides the work's dominant warm note, its color resonating with the interior furnishings in Vuillard's characteristic manner of making figure and setting share the same chromatic palette. His oil application gives the shawl a soft, textile quality, while the face is painted with sufficient specificity to establish individual character without conventional portrait formality.