Princess Marthe Bibesco

Marthe Bibesco was born in Bucharest and by 1920 she was a well-known writer in French. Her first book, an account of a journey through Persia, came out when she was 22 and was crowned by the Académie française. She had spent the war years running a military hospital in Bucharest while the city was under German occupation. Vuillard painted her shortly afterwards in a Paris drawing room, and he gives the tapestry, the lamp and the vase of flowers as much attention as the princess herself, which is how he had painted interiors since the 1890s, when he belonged to the group of young painters who called themselves the Nabis. The support is cardboard rather than canvas, which drinks the oil and leaves the surface matt. The museum in São Paulo bought it in 1958, in the years when the Brazilian newspaper owner Assis Chateaubriand was buying European pictures for the city.