Portrait of Madame Guerin

Portrait of Madame Guerin from 1916 at the Art Institute of Chicago shows Vuillard's portraiture in its middle period — more spacious and less radically flattened than his early Nabi work, but retaining the characteristic absorption of sitter into environment. By 1916 Vuillard was regularly painting the wealthy Parisian social world — industrialists, collectors, and their wives — in their own apartments and country houses. The Art Institute of Chicago's French collection provides important context alongside its other Vuillard holdings.

The mature portrait handling balances the sitter's presence against the richly described interior without the extreme flatness of early Nabi work. Madame Guerin is rendered with more conventional tonal modeling than Vuillard's 1890s portraits, though the surrounding environment receives equal pictorial investment and the overall compression of space remains characteristic.