Madame Vuillard by the Fireplace

For half a century this little picture was almost never seen. It is one of the French paintings taken from private collections in Germany at the end of the Second World War and brought to the Hermitage in Leningrad, where they were kept out of view. In 1995 the museum finally showed 74 of them in an exhibition called Hidden Treasures Revealed, and this interior was among them. Vuillard painted it around 1895, in oil on a sheet of cardboard, and the woman is his mother. She stands with her back to us at the mantelpiece, in a violet-blue dress, and her face appears only in the mirror above the fire, among the flowers on the shelf.