Landscapes and Interiors: Interior with Pink Wallpaper

Édouard Vuillard

Color lithograph on China paper

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Interior with Pink Wallpaper (Intérieur aux Tentures Roses) is one of three related prints from the celebrated series Paysages et Intérieurs (Landscapes and Interiors), a suite of thirteen color lithographs created by the French Nabis artist Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) and published in 1899 by the avant-garde dealer Ambroise Vollard in an edition of one hundred. The print depicts an intimate domestic interior of a middle-class French household, in which the boldly patterned pink floral wallpaper dominates the composition, collapsing spatial depth and overwhelming the room with decorative surface. Printed by master lithographer Auguste Clot, the series showcases Vuillard's distinctive approach to color and pattern, translating fleeting impressions of everyday private life into flattened, decorative compositions that bear the influence of Japanese woodblock printmaking. Widely recognized today as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century color lithography, the series represents the height of Vuillard's printmaking achievement and a landmark in the history of the Nabis movement.