La soirée musicale

Around 1899 the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard bought this picture straight from Vuillard, in the same years he was publishing an album of the painter's colour lithographs. It shows an evening of music at home, painted somewhere between 1896 and 1899 in the dark, close-packed manner the painter used for rooms full of people. Guests in black crowd behind the back of a striped chair in the foreground, one figure stands apart, and a lamp with a rosy shade glows against patterned walls. The faces are only a few dabs of paint. It later belonged to Vuillard's dealer and friend Jos Hessel, then, from 1950, to the New York collectors Donald and Jean Stralem. In 2012, when the Musée d'Orsay devoted an exhibition to Misia Natanson, the pianist whose musical evenings drew the painters of La Revue blanche, this painting was part of it.