Interior (Madame Vuillard and Grandmother Roussel at L'Étang-la-Ville)

By the early 1900s part of Édouard Vuillard's family life had moved out of Paris, to L'Étang-la-Ville, a village west of the city where his sister Marie and her husband, the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, had made their country home. Roussel's mother had settled there first, in a small house, and her move helped the family find the village. This picture, painted around 1902, brings the two mothers together. Madame Vuillard and Madame Roussel sit sewing in the light of a window, in a dim room at La Montagne, the hamlet on the hillside where the Roussels lived. The title calls the second woman Grandmother Roussel, a name that would suit either of them, since they were the two grandmothers of Marie's children, Jacques and Annette. Vuillard painted the scene in oil on cardboard, about 70 centimetres wide.