Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940)

According to the authors of Vuillard's catalogue raisonné, in the present work "Vuillard has placed his model in one of those boudoir chairs in which he liked to seat his mother and sister in his Nabis period. Using the white walls of the rue Truffaut studio as a background, he has sketched one of the most relaxed nudes of his entire career. The rendering of the model's body is somewhat rudimentary, and no facial characteristics are to be seen; nevertheless, the painting cannot be said to be Nabi in inspiration, since the modelling of the flesh tones is delicately suggested by small white highlights. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first composition in which Vuillard openly depicts the hairs of a woman's pudenda. The lesson of Bonnard's Indolent Woman seems to have paid off: what he presents us with here is his version of Courbet's Origin of the World" (op. cit., p. 664).