Woman in Black

Woman in Black at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, painted in 1891, shows Vuillard at the moment of his most radical formal ambition — the dark dress of the figure merging with the surrounding interior's shadows and dark tones to create the densely compressed, nearly abstract surface characteristic of his early Nabi peak. The choice of a figure in black dress — a common enough choice in the late nineteenth century, when black was fashionable in bourgeois women's clothing — gave him a subject where the figure's dark tones could dissolve most completely into the dark tones of the surrounding environment, achieving the maximum compression of figure and ground that the Nabi doctrine demanded. His treatment of black in these early interiors was not the social black of mourning or the dramatic black of theatrical effect but a formal black: a deep value that organized the picture surface and through which the figure maintained her presence not through contrast but through subtle inflections of tone and texture against the surrounding darkness.

The figure in black is defined by the lighter tones surrounding it rather than by internal modeling — the dress receding into near-darkness while the face and hands emerge as the lightest passages. Vuillard plays the black of the clothing against the complex pattern of the background, creating visual interest through the interplay of figure and ground rather than through the figure itself.