Interior with Red Hangings

At first glance this is a still life. A tall pale bottle stands on a white cloth with a thin red stripe, a round basket sits in front, and behind them a red curtain edged with dark bobbles hangs beside a brown panel. Then the pale blur above the basket turns into a fair head, and the blue patch beneath it into a small child, crouching half out of sight. When the picture was sold in Paris in 2000, it went under the title Child in Blue, Crouching. Vuillard painted it around 1891, in oil on a piece of cardboard about 43 centimetres high. He never sold it. The name in the lower right corner is a stamp added from his studio, and the picture was still there when he died in 1940. It reached the Musée d'Orsay in 2011.