The Seamstress

Vuillard grew up inside a dressmaking shop. His widowed mother ran a corset and dress business out of their Paris flat, and the boy spent his days among bolts of patterned cloth, seamstresses bent over their work, and the hum of the sewing table. He never really left that room as a subject. Here a woman sits with her back to us, sewing by a window, her dress and the tabletop dissolving into the wallpaper behind her so the whole surface reads as one field of pattern. Vuillard even left patches of the bare board showing through the paint. In the 1890s he and his friends, the group known as the Nabis, were pushing painting toward exactly this kind of flat, intimate decoration.