Femme lisant

Femme lisant from 1909 at the Fitzwilliam Museum shows Vuillard's intimism in its more relaxed late phase — the figure of a woman reading absorbed into an interior that has lost some of the early Nabi period's radical flatness but retains the painter's characteristic sense of pattern and color. By 1909 Vuillard had achieved considerable commercial success and was moving in fashionable Parisian circles, yet his subject matter remained the domestic and intimate. A reading woman was among his most recurrent motifs — the absorption of the activity mirroring his own contemplative observation.

The 1909 painting shows Vuillard's transitional handling — the early flatness given more tonal modeling, the space more conventionally recessive than in his Nabi peak, but the surface still animated by his characteristic broken touch. The woman's figure and surrounding furniture are rendered with equal care, avoiding any hierarchy between human and environmental elements.