Madame Vuillard in un salotto

In 1893 Vuillard was spending his evenings on stage sets. His friend the actor Lugne-Poe had just opened the Theatre de l'Oeuvre in Paris and was staging Ibsen and Maeterlinck, plays largely about people shut up in rooms, and Vuillard painted backdrops and designed the programmes for him. By day he worked at home, in the flat he shared with his mother, who made corsets there, so the apartment was a workroom as well. He went on living with her until he was 60. The pictures he made of her in those years are often startlingly small. This one is roughly 28 centimetres square, a whole room and his mother inside it fitted onto something the size of a sheet of writing paper, which is about as far from the salon-sized figure painting of the 1890s as a Paris painter could get.