Young Woman Trying on a Hat

Hat-wearing in fin-de-siècle bourgeois Paris was a gendered social ritual with clear codes of class and occasion, and Vuillard's 'Young Woman Trying on a Hat' of around 1900 enters this world with characteristic obliqueness. Where a more conventionally minded painter would use the subject for light society portraiture, Vuillard absorbed the woman and her hat into the dense decorative fabric of his interior, the millinery becoming one element within a larger pattern of wallpaper, fabric, and light. The painting belongs to his sustained observation of women's domestic activity — sewing, reading, dressing, arranging — subjects that other Nabi painters like Maurice Denis treated with Symbolist idealism but that Vuillard rendered with a sociological attentiveness closer to the contemporary naturalism of Zola. Berthe Morisot had explored similar feminine domestic subjects in the 1870s and 1880s, but her approach was frankly Impressionist; Vuillard's compression of interior space was a Nabi inheritance from Gauguin and the Japanese print tradition. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has built one of the strongest American collections of Post-Impressionist intimisme around holdings like this work.

The composition focuses on the woman and the hat, with the surrounding interior serving as the patterned environment in which the figure is both situated and partially absorbed. Vuillard's handling of the millinery—its structure, ornament, and the way it frames the face—tests his capacity for decorative precision.