Sketch for 'Mme Jean Trarieux and her Daughters'

This 1912 canvas at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is a preparatory sketch for a formal group portrait of Madame Jean Trarieux and her daughters, showing Vuillard working out the compositional relationships before committing to the finished work. The Trarieux family were part of the Parisian legal and cultural elite—Jean Trarieux was a former Minister of Justice and founder of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme. Vuillard's preparatory sketches in oil show his process of integrating figures and interior with the same concern for decorative coherence that marks his finished portraits.

As a sketch, this work is more freely handled than the finished portrait would be, with Vuillard establishing the figures' positions and the interior's general color character in broad, exploratory strokes. The compositional structure—how the women and the surrounding room relate—is worked out here with an openness absent from his more resolved paintings.