La Commode rouge

In the spring of 1890 the dealer Siegfried Bing filled the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with a huge show of Japanese prints, and young painters in the city, Vuillard among them, took a great deal from it. Writers on his work often trace to those prints the way he handles a room like this one, painted around 1892. The canvas is tall and narrow. The red chest of drawers is seen from a little above, as one flat slab of colour, and the brown marks scattered over the wallpaper sit right on the surface with no depth at all. A woman in a long dark dress stands at the chest, bending over a small pot of yellow flowers. Beside her stands a picture in a reddish frame, and at the top the corner of another frame is cut off by the edge of the canvas.