The Newspaper

The Newspaper depicts a figure — most likely a male member of Vuillard's domestic circle — absorbed in reading a newspaper, a motif that recurs in bourgeois genre painting from Daumier through Degas to the Nabis. The newspaper reader, by definition, is in the private domestic world while simultaneously connected to the public world of politics and events — a dual status that made the subject interesting to painters of domestic interiors. For Vuillard, the absorbed reader provided a figure type as legitimate as the seamstress or the sleeping figure: a person fully occupied with something other than being observed.

The large newspaper spread functions as a compositional element, its grey-white surface providing a flat, relatively neutral zone against which the figure's face and the surrounding domestic furnishings are set. Vuillard's characteristic pattern of room fittings surrounds the absorbed reader.