The Dressing-Room, Madame Hessel Reading at Amfréville

Painted in 1906 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this work depicts Lucy Hessel—wife of the art dealer Jos Hessel and Vuillard's closest friend and probable love—reading in a dressing room at Amfréville in Normandy, where she and her husband maintained a country property. Lucy Hessel was the dominant figure of Vuillard's emotional life from about 1900 until his death, and he painted her and her domestic world with a sustained intimacy that gave his mature work much of its warmth. The dressing room—a space of private femininity—is rendered with the same affectionate specificity he had given his mother's domestic spaces a decade earlier.

Vuillard integrates Lucy Hessel's figure with the dressing room's accumulated objects—mirrors, bottles, clothing—in a composition of domestic density. The warm morning light filtering through summer curtains creates a golden tonality that unifies the scene, and his oil handling is looser than in his 1890s work, more atmospheric in its description of light and air.