La causette [The Chat]

Painted in 1893 and held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 'La causette' is an early Nabis-period work showing two women in intimate conversation—the kind of quiet, undramatic domestic exchange that Vuillard elevated to the primary subject of his art throughout the 1890s. The Nabi ideal rejected Impressionism's plein-air empiricism in favor of decorative synthesis, and Vuillard's interior scenes from this period achieve a radical flattening of figure and ground that anticipates twentieth-century abstraction while remaining rooted in the observed reality of Parisian apartment life.

The two figures are compressed against their interior setting, their clothing merging with the decorative patterns of walls and furnishings in Vuillard's characteristic early manner. Working in oil on canvas, he applies paint in dry, closely valued touches that deny depth and affirm the two-dimensional surface of the picture.