Donna con vestito a righe

Vuillard made this in 1895 as one of five panels for the apartment of Thadee Natanson, who ran an influential avant-garde magazine in Paris, and his wife Misia, a gifted pianist whose salon drew the city's writers and painters. Vuillard belonged to a young group who called themselves the Nabis, after a Hebrew word for prophet, and who wanted a picture to suggest a mood rather than simply copy what was in front of them. So the room here is flattened into pattern. A woman in a red striped dress bends among flowers, her figure almost dissolving into the wallpaper and the blooms around her. Writers on the panel have wondered whether its deep reds were meant to echo the music Misia played in those same rooms.