Jeanne Lanvin

Jeanne Lanvin, painted in 1935 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, was Vuillard's last major commissioned portrait before his death in 1940 at the age of seventy-one. Lanvin had been among the most important figures in French fashion since the early twentieth century — her house, founded in 1889, had become one of the defining institutions of French haute couture, and she was celebrated equally as a couturière and as a theatrical costume designer. Her long association with Vuillard was fitting: as the painter who had made fabric, pattern, and clothing into central subjects of his art, he was ideally suited to depict a woman whose entire life had been devoted to the aesthetics of dress. The 1935 portrait situates her in a richly appointed interior where fabric and furnishing create the layered decorative field that was Vuillard's signature environment, the couturière embedded in the world of textiles that she and he both inhabited in their different ways. The late date shows Vuillard working in a somewhat more conventional portrait mode, the extreme flatness of his Nabi period having given way to the assured if slightly academic technique of his last decade.

The late portrait situates Lanvin within a richly appointed interior setting where fabric, costume, and furnishing create a unified decorative field — appropriate for a subject who had dedicated her life to the aesthetics of dress and interior design. The figure is rendered with the assured, somewhat academic technique of Vuillard's late style.