Young Woman in a Room

Young Woman in a Room of 1892 belongs to Vuillard's early Nabi period at its most compact and formally radical — the young woman in an interior rendered through his characteristic absorption of figure into patterned environment, the domestic space pressing close around the human presence within it. His women in rooms from 1892-93 represent the fullest realization of his early intimist program: the principle, derived from Maurice Denis's theoretical writings and from Gauguin's Synthetist example, that the painting's surface was sovereign, and that figure and ground had equal rights within the flat decorative field. The Yale Art Gallery holds several canvases from this concentrated period of his development, making it one of the American institutions best placed to document the formation of his mature style. The young woman's presence within the room is rendered with the same quality of domestic absorption he brought to all his figure subjects — she is not performing for the viewer but simply present within her own environment.

The palette at this early stage is somewhat cooler and more restricted than his mature work, with less of the dense chromatic richness he would develop through the decade. The figure's integration into the room's patterns is already the organizing principle, however.