Marcelle Aron (Madame Tristan Bernard)

Painted in 1914, this portrait of Marcelle Aron, wife of the playwright and humorist Tristan Bernard, was executed at the height of Vuillard's mature portrait practice. By this period he had become the preferred portraitist of the Parisian bourgeois intelligentsia, capturing writers, collectors, and their families in domestic settings that say as much about their milieu as about their physiognomy. Held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, this work is characteristic of his approach: the subject is placed within her domestic environment, surrounded by the objects that define her cultural and social identity.

Vuillard uses oil on canvas with his characteristic integration of figure and interior, warm pinks and reds in the subject's clothing picking up similar tones in the furnishings. The handling is more open than his 1890s work, with less systematic pattern-dissolution and a greater sense of atmospheric light describing the room's space.