Woman at the Window

The nineteenth century witnessed the evolution of the nuclear family unit—father, mother, and children—into a nexus of bourgeois social life throughout Europe and North America. In the field of art, this development is mirrored in an increased emphasis on quotidian scenes of everyday family life. By the century’s end, infants—and not only those born of royal or aristocratic parents—had become a pictorial motif equal in importance to any other human subject. In the 1880s and 1890s, many painters specialized in personalized mother-and-child and sick-child scenes, and even those who did not could rarely seclude them entirely from their pictorial repertoires. Edouard Vuillard adopted the bourgeois household as a dominant leitmotif of his art from the outset of his career in the late 1880s. Middle-class interiors and mother-and-child scenes were an obvious thematic choice for an artist who had grown up in the attentive care of his mother, with whom he shared a strong emotional bond.In this small but aesthetically powerful image by Vuillard of a woman embracing a baby, the unidentifiable woman holds the infant—given the pink garment, probably a girl—over a window ledge as if to show her offspring to someone down below, or perhaps to give her a peek of the wider world. The woman, either the child’s mother or nanny, wears a fashionable white top with blue polka dots. This delicate garment, together with the baby’s pink overalls, forms a warm center for a composition dominated by the forceful diagonals of the window. The green lintel above the window and the gray sill below it add a touch of theatrical drama to the picture by forcefully separating the dark cavity of the interior space from the anonymous building’s bare exterior wall. The painting derives its visual power from the admixture of two styles: a synthetic treatment of color planes explored by Vuillard in the early 1890s, and a decorative aesthetic sensitized toward textural elements and patterns that the painter began to apply to his works in the mid-1890s. On stylistic grounds Woman at a Window can be dated to about 1895–1900. This conjecture is supported by the picture’s thematic synchronicity with images in which Vuillard’s sister, Marie Roussel, and his female muse, Misia Natanson, respectively, pose as mothers of infants. Typically Vuillard portrays his feminine sitters in cozy interiors or domesticated gardens, but in Woman at a Window he challenges the determinacy of these bourgeois spaces without allowing the viewer’s eye to meander along decorative patterns or to delight in lush patches of color. For whatever reason, on this occasion Vuillard painted an exclamation as opposed to a lullaby.