Interieur. Mutter und Schwester des Künstlers

In 1893 Édouard Vuillard was in his mid-twenties, still living with his widowed mother in a cramped Paris apartment that doubled as her dressmaking workshop. Those crowded rooms, thick with fabric and pattern, are the whole world of his early paintings. Here his mother sits solid and dark at the left, the family's anchor, while his sister Marie is pressed back against the wall, almost swallowed by its speckled paper. Marie had just become engaged to Vuillard's friend and fellow painter Ker-Xavier Roussel. Look how the wallpaper climbs to the low ceiling and flattens the young woman until she seems part of the pattern, while the older woman stays firmly of the room.