Édouard Vuillard

Vuillard executed this picture of his neice, Annette Roussel, when the little girl was about four years old.  Annette was the daughter of the artist's sister, Marie and the artist Ker-Xavier Roussel.  After her birth in 1898, Annette became the subject of many of Vuillard's compositions, and here he depicts her playing with a metal tumbler while supervised from a distance by an unidentified figure.  According to Elizabeth Wynne Easton, "Vuillard pays attention to his niece's small gestures and her tiny rounded form, leaving the rest of the room in a comparative haze.  Dramatic distortions of scale, like dramatic effects of light and shadow, are usually absent from these works: Vuillard bathes his subject in the warmth of his evident contentment" (Elizabeth Wynne Easton, The Intimate Interiors of Edouard Vuillard, Houston, 1989-90, p. 98). 

Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval have identified the furnishings depicted here as belonging to the Roussels' house, La Montagne.  In their catalogue raisonné, they have written the following about this work: "Note the astonishing floral patterned wallpaper; basking in sunlight, which has been lingered over in great detail by the painter and contrasts sharply with the area of stiff red wall.  Equally remarkable is the hyper-realistic rendering of the bentwood chair and the violence of the shadow it casts on the wall, as though lit by a flash of magnesium.  The same style of chair can be seen in a number of photographs taken at La Montagne, proving that the scene is set at Ker-Xavier Roussel's house at L'Etang-la-Ville, not at the rue Truffaut" (Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard, The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, vol. 2, Paris, 2003, p. 608).