Portrait of Thaddeus Natanson in chair

Thaddée Natanson was co-founder of the Revue Blanche, the leading journal of Symbolist and avant-garde culture in Paris in the 1890s, and one of Vuillard's closest friends and most important early patrons. The Revue Blanche published criticism, fiction, and political commentary that defined the intellectual world Vuillard inhabited; Natanson's wife Misia later became one of the most painted women of the period, her portrait sessions with Vuillard constituting a sustained artistic and emotional relationship. Depicting Natanson in an armchair situates him in the domestic ease of bourgeois intellectual life that Vuillard made his signature subject matter.

Vuillard situates the sitter in a chair that nearly merges with the surrounding upholstery and walls in his characteristic pattern-dissolve technique. The face receives the most specific treatment; the body and chair dissolve into a warm, closely valued tonal field. The paint is built up in thin, layered touches rather than heavy impasto.