Le Chignon

A founding member of the Nabi group, Édouard Vuillard captured, with great talent and sensitivity, snippets from everyday life, deliberately banishing details to further express the intimate atmosphere of interior scenes, focusing instead on earth-tones palettes and patterns. In the present work, the artist has cropped the composition so that the sitter’s face is out of view, revealing only her hair and blouse, as well as the wall or entryway behind her. A small yellow detail near the lower left reveals the back of a chair—the woman is seated, looking away from the viewer. Based on a similar composition that shows a broader view of the scene (Salomon and Cogeval, no. IV-185), the woman could be Madame Vuillard, seated at the dinner table, possibly absorbed in conversation.
While executed on an intimate scale, the present work highlights one of Vuillard’s strengths: the use of patterns and textures to knit together the foreground and background of his interiors, causing three-dimensional perspectival space to merge with the two-dimensional picture plane. Indeed, the blouse of the sitter is richly painted in colors that echo the wallpaper behind her, linking the figure with her background. This is further heightened by the extremely cropped composition, which excludes any hints of receding space.
Le Chignon was acquired by the family of the present owner in 1958, and remained in the Phillips collection ever since.