Arthur Fontaine

Around 1901, when Vuillard painted him, Arthur Fontaine was the first director of the Office du travail, the French government bureau that gathered figures on work, wages and strikes. He sits at a broad desk behind a stack of large open volumes, one hand resting on the pages, with a wicker basket at the near edge and a dark wall hanging of leaves behind him. A bookcase glows at the right. Five years later Fontaine represented France at Bern, where two of the first international labour conventions were signed, one limiting women's night work, the other banning white phosphorus in matches. After the First World War he helped draft part of the Treaty of Versailles, and from 1919 until his death in 1931 he chaired the governing body of the new International Labour Organization. In 1949 his sons gave the portrait to the national museum of modern art in Paris.