Young Woman with Her Hand on the Door Handle

This little board, about 32 centimetres high, is almost all one colour. The door, the wall and the young woman's dress share the same warm orange-brown, broken only by the grey patches of the dress pattern, a dark band down its front and a pale patch at her collar. She bends forward with her head lowered, one arm stretched out to the door handle. Vuillard's initials and the year, 91, sit in the upper left corner. By about 1948 the picture belonged to the New York collectors Donald and Jean Stralem, and that year it hung in a show of the painter's early work at the Jacques Seligmann gallery there. In 1954 it went to the Vuillard exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Zeïneb and Jean-Pierre Marcie-Rivière gave it to the Musée d'Orsay in 2011 but kept it at home until Jean-Pierre died in January 2016.