Marthe Mellot

In February 1892 the director André Antoine, whose Théâtre-Libre had made its name staging plays about ordinary people in plain, natural speech, put on Eugène Brieux's Blanchette, the story of a village girl educated out of her place in the world. Marthe Mellot, then in her early twenties, was in the cast. Vuillard painted her at about this time, on a small piece of plywood barely 22 centimetres high. She is almost all silhouette, a single mass of black from her hat down to the hem of her coat, set against a pale wall. Only her face and two pale hands raised to her collar break the black, and she seems to be smiling at someone just beside us. In the lower right corner sits a small stamp with his initials, E.V.