Le déjeuner en famille

In the spring of 1899 Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists' dealer, gave his Paris gallery over to a younger generation, in a group show billed as Symbolists and Neo-Impressionists. This family lunch hung there, freshly finished. Vuillard wrote the date under his name at the lower left, E Vuillard, 99. Across a sheet of cardboard more than 90 centimetres wide, a bearded man with a newspaper, an older woman in black and a young woman bending over the baby in her arms share a table. A red and white cloth lies over a darker patterned one, among bottles and a basket of bread. Behind them the wallpaper is thick with flowers, and a large dark picture hangs above. The dealer Jos Hessel owned the painting until 1942, and it later passed to Lucie Grandjean-Hessel, who left it to the Musée d'Orsay in 2016.