La Couturière (The Dressmaker)

Édouard Vuillard

Color lithograph on paper

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This work belongs to one of the most sustained and personally resonant themes in Vuillard's career: the figure of the seamstress or dressmaker absorbed in her work within a domestic interior. Vuillard grew up immersed in the daily rhythms of his mother's dressmaking workshop, and working women bent over their sewing became a defining motif of his Nabi period. In the documented lithograph version published in the Album de la Revue Blanche (1895), Vuillard renders the seated dressmaker through bold, flat patches of blue and ochre — denoting wallpaper, fabric, and furniture — while the figure's pale silhouette partially dissolves into the surrounding pattern, exemplifying the Nabi aesthetic of flattened pictorial space influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. Vuillard was a central member of Les Nabis, the avant-garde Post-Impressionist brotherhood active in Paris from roughly 1888 to 1900, and his intimate domestic scenes earned him the designation of 'Intimist' alongside his close friend Pierre Bonnard.