La Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac

Around 1930, musical Paris knew this woman as a singer. Marie-Blanche de Polignac, the only child of the couturière Jeanne Lanvin, was by then the wife of Count Jean de Polignac, and she sang soprano in the private concerts of the city's grand salons. In 1937 she was one of the voices the conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger brought into a Paris studio for a set of recordings. Vuillard painted her some time between 1928 and 1932, and there is no piano or score anywhere in the room. She sits on the edge of a bed in a white jacket and a black skirt, holding a small white dog. Flowered paper covers the walls, and through an open doorway you look into a second room furnished with blue armchairs. She kept the canvas until her death in 1958, and left it to the national museums.