Personnages dans un intérieur. L’intimité

Three women share a modern interior in the intimacy of an afternoon: one sits on a sofa reading a newspaper whose loose sheets lie near her, an open album of coloured prints at her feet; the others face each other in a doorway at right, while cushions scatter over rugs, books pile on a chair, and flowers rise from a tall vase. This large panel of 1896 is a decorative work by Édouard Vuillard, the Nabi painter of the everyday interior, and everything in it — the flowered wallpaper that recalls the mille-fleurs tapestries of the late Middle Ages, the printed patterns of the dresses — joins in the dense, flat ornament that made him the poet of the Parisian home. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.