Madame Hessel au Sofa

Édouard Vuillard

Oil on board

Walker Art Gallery

In this intimate portrait, Lucie Hessel — wife of Vuillard's art dealer Jos Hessel and the painter's closest muse — reclines on a sofa, smiling directly at the viewer, with a collection of paintings visible on the walls behind her, subtly signaling her status as a woman of taste and cultural refinement. Executed in oil on board in Vuillard's characteristic Intimist manner, the work combines warm, richly patterned surfaces with an unusual freshness and spontaneity that set it apart from more formal portraiture of the period. Vuillard (1868–1940) was a founding member of the Nabis, a Post-Impressionist group inspired by Gauguin, and became one of the foremost practitioners of Intimism — a mode of painting focused on small-scale domestic scenes rendered with exaggerated, mood-laden color. Lucie Hessel was among Vuillard's most frequently depicted subjects, and this painting, held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, is a version of a composition he made as a personal gift for her, with a closely related work in the Norton Simon collection in Pasadena.