Madame Vuillard in a Drawing Room

Madame Vuillard in a Drawing Room from 1893, also at the Hermitage, depicts the artist's mother — one of the most significant presences in his biographical world and artistic subject matter. Madame Vuillard ran a corset-making atelier that supported the family after her husband's death, and her apartment and circle formed the primary content of her son's art for over two decades. The drawing room setting is typical: modest, bourgeois, densely furnished — the visual world of lower-middle-class Parisian domesticity that Vuillard elevated into something approaching the sacred. The Hermitage holdings make Saint Petersburg an important venue for understanding his intimist project.

The figure of Madame Vuillard is subsumed into the drawing room's patterned surfaces — the wallpaper, chair covers, and carpet compete visually with the figure herself. This deliberate dissolution of the figure into domestic pattern is the most radical aspect of Vuillard's early approach.