Jeanne Lanvin

In 1933 Jeanne Lanvin was 66, and the fashion house that had grown out of the millinery shop she opened in 1889 was still hers to run. That year she commissioned this portrait, and Vuillard painted her at work in her office on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. She sits behind a dark, glossy desk in a green jacket, turning over large sheets of drawings, with a pot of brushes and pencils within reach. Folded fabric samples fill the open shelves behind her, rows of bound books rise above them, and on the left a small white bust stands in a glass case. The museum records that he worked on the canvas from May to November. Her daughter, by then the Countess Jean de Polignac, left the portrait to the national museums in 1958.