Le Sommeil de Madame Vuillard

When this little canvas came up at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris in 1964, it was catalogued as Le Malade, the invalid. At another Paris sale in 2001 it had become a young child dozing. Both guesses are easy to understand. The sleeper is swaddled in pale bedclothes with flushed red cheeks, and nothing in the picture says who it is. The Musée d'Orsay calls it the sleep of Madame Vuillard, the painter's mother, and dates it to around 1891 or 1892. The bedding is painted so thinly that the weave of the canvas shows through the white. At the right edge a dark shape and a mass of yellow ochre close off the view, and a patch of red lies at the far end of the bed. The picture stayed in Vuillard's studio until his death in 1940.