Le Sommeil de Madame Vuillard

Le Sommeil de Madame Vuillard — the sleep of the artist's mother — belongs to the series of intimate paintings Vuillard made within the family apartment in Paris that became his primary subject throughout the 1890s. Marie Vuillard, a seamstress, was the central figure of his domestic world: her sleep, her sewing, her movements through the cluttered apartment provided the material for some of his most compelling early works. The Musee d'Orsay holds this canvas alongside others from the same period, enabling viewers to understand the apartment and its occupant as a sustained pictorial subject. Sleep as a subject removed social performance, allowing Vuillard to paint his mother as a figure absorbed entirely into her environment.

A sleeping figure in a domestic interior allowed Vuillard to press his flattening tendencies furthest: the relaxed body loses its commanding verticality and becomes another pattern element within the scene. He renders the bedclothes and surrounding fabric in the same dense, interlocking brushwork as the wallpaper and furnishings.