En visite, les demoiselles Fornachon

The two visitors of the title, the Fornachon sisters, sit side by side in matching blue dresses and dark hats, in a small oval scene from around 1891 or 1892. Across from them a figure in white bends towards a woman in black, and the wall behind the sisters breaks up into loose, dark, curling pattern. Vuillard kept the picture all his life. After his death in 1940 it went to Jacques Salomon, husband of the painter's niece Annette Roussel. Salomon was entrusted with the family's letters, photographs and notebooks. On that archive his son Antoine, with the art historian Guy Cogeval, built the catalogue of Vuillard's paintings and pastels, published in 2003. It is painted in oil on cardboard backed with wood. By 1954 the picture had crossed the Atlantic, to the Wildenstein gallery in New York.