Girl at the Linen Cupboard

Vuillard's father died in 1884, and his mother kept the household going by running a corset and dressmaking workshop out of the family's Paris apartment. So for years the rooms he painted were rooms where seamstresses worked and cloth was stacked, measured and cut. The business of the house was fabric, and a cupboard of linen was stock. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which owns this small interior, dates it to about 1894 or 1895, when Vuillard was in his mid-twenties and belonged to the Nabis, young painters who had taken up Maurice Denis's line of 1890 that a picture is before anything else a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order. He went on living with his mother until her death in 1928, and she appears in his paintings more often than anyone else.