A l'Opéra [At the Opera]

A l'Opéra (At the Opera) of around 1900, in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, places Vuillard's intimate scale and decorative approach within one of Paris's great public spectacle venues — the opera house where bourgeois social life performed itself for its own admiration. Vuillard rarely engaged with grand public subjects, preferring the compressed interiors of bourgeois apartments and the private dynamics of family life; the opera interior here is treated with the same close attention to fabric, pattern, and artificial light that defines his domestic subjects. The NGA's collection of Post-Impressionist work includes this canvas as a rare example of Vuillard operating at the edge of the social world his art usually approached from within rather than as spectacle.

The opera interior is rendered almost entirely in dark tones punctuated by the gleam of artificial light on textiles, jewellery, and gilded architecture. Vuillard's characteristic compression of space is amplified here by the theatre's own spatial compression of social class and aspiration, the figures and their ornament merging into a dense decorative field.