Marthe Mellot en bleu

This little panel is only 27 centimetres high and not quite ten wide. Vuillard fills it with one figure, the actress Marthe Mellot, in a vivid blue dress and a wide hat, against a pale pinkish ground. He painted it around 1891 or 1892, when she was just starting out on the Paris stage. The picture then stayed close to her for most of a century. Its first owner was her husband, the playwright Alfred Natanson, who wrote under the name Alfred Athis. After him it went to their daughter Annette Vaillant, a novelist who later wrote a book about Pierre Bonnard, one of the painters of her parents' circle. It left the family only around 2002, when a Paris gallery handled it, and came to the Musée d'Orsay in 2011 with the gift of the collectors Zeïneb and Jean-Pierre Marcie-Rivière.