Woman at Her Toilette

Woman at Her Toilette at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, painted in 1891, belongs to Vuillard's most concentrated Nabi period and to the specifically feminine subject of private self-preparation — the toilet as the moment between private and public life when the self is assembled for social presentation. His treatment differs fundamentally from the tradition of the toilette in French painting, which ran from rococo sensuality through academic idealization to Degas's detached observation of women at their physical self-maintenance. Vuillard's 1891 canvas refuses both sensuality and detachment: the woman is simply present within her private space, her self-preparation an activity like any other domestic activity, neither remarkable nor hidden. The compressed, flat space of this early canvas makes the ordinary act of self-presentation into a formal event within a decorative field, the mirror and the feminine objects of the dressing table providing compositional elements alongside the figure herself.

The compact interior is organized through the relationship between the woman's form and the surrounding furniture and walls. Vuillard treats the scene as a series of interlocking flat areas of color and pattern, the figure distinguished from the environment by differences in hue and mark-making rather than by spatial recession.