Portrait of Thaddeus Natanson in chair

Two metres high and just as wide, this is a very big canvas for a portrait, and yet the sitter hardly poses. The writer and editor Thadée Natanson, an old friend of the painter, leans far back in a red armchair with his legs stretched out, reading a paper. Around him are a bookcase, a tall mirror, a small side table and a patterned rug. It is painted in distemper, a glue-based paint, with the strokes left open across the whole surface. Vuillard finished it in 1906 and showed it in Paris that year. In 1908 it travelled to Berlin for the 15th exhibition of the Secession, the city's main society for modern art, and in 1909 it was on show in Brussels. It stayed in the family until 1953, when Natanson's widow left it to the national museums.