Woman Sewing before a Garden Window

A woman sits sewing, silhouetted against a garden window crossed by a trellis. Vuillard signed and dated it at the lower right, EVuillard 95. The Museum of Fine Arts points to what holds the little picture together. The criss-cross of light and shadow in the trellis echoes the dotted print of her blouse, so the figure and the window read as one patterned surface. It is small, about 31 by 36 centimetres, painted in oil on paper that was later mounted on canvas and then on a panel. Vuillard sold it himself to a Swiss collector, Emil Staub-Terlinden, a leather manufacturer from Männedorf on Lake Zurich, who began buying modern French painting in 1916 and toured the Paris dealers with his wife Alma. He died in 1929. In 1938 his widow consigned the picture to the Wildenstein gallery, which sold it in 1941 to a Boston collector who left it to the museum in 1948.