Vallotton's Salon in La Naz/Romanel

In the summer of 1900 Vuillard stayed at Felix Vallotton's salon in La Naz near Romanel in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, and this interior view records a specific room with the particularity of a document and the decorative intensity of a Nabi painting. For Vuillard, interiors were charged psychological spaces: the arrangement of furniture, wallpaper, and light defined character as much as any portrait. Painting his friend's salon also carried an element of reciprocity, since Vallotton had made incisive woodcut portraits of Nabi circle members; Vuillard's canvas functions as a visual homage to Vallotton's domestic world. The Kunstmuseum Bern, which holds significant holdings in early twentieth-century Swiss and French modernism, preserves this work.

Vuillard compresses near and far into a single patterned surface, with the salon's furnishings — chairs, curtains, table — rendered as interlocking zones of color rather than perspectivally receding objects. The muted palette of green, red, and dark wood tones gives the room its particular Helvetic gravity.