Vuillard's painting comes out of a single particular setting — the rooms of his mother's apartment in Paris, where she ran her sewing workshop — and from that setting he built one of the most original visual languages of late nineteenth-century European art.
Vuillard's life was structured by a small set of long, deep relationships. The death of his father when Vuillard was an adolescent left him alone with his mother, a corsetière who supported the household by running a sewing workshop in the family apartment, and he would live with her until her death in 1928. The dressmaker's rooms — bolts of patterned fabric, the tables and screens of the workshop, the figures of women bent over their sewing in afternoon light — became the immediate material from which his major early paintings were built.
His school years at the Lycée Condorcet placed him among a remarkable circle of future writers and artists, and his decision to pursue painting brought him into contact with Paul Sérusier, slightly older and recently returned from Pont-Aven with a small landscape painted under the direct instruction of Paul Gauguin — a panel he called The Talisman. The simplified flat colour and symbolist intent of the work prompted the formation of the Nabis circle, which Vuillard joined as one of its central figures.
His mature work in the Nabis period took its character from a deep absorption in Japanese woodblock prints, an admiration for the decorative traditions of European tapestry and embroidery, and the particular pattern-saturation of his mother's workshop. The result was a body of small interior paintings in which figure, wallpaper, fabric, and furniture dissolve into one another in flattened planes of color and pattern, and in which the conventional distinction between figure and ground gives way to an all-over decorative surface. The work was unprecedented in European painting and remains the basis of his reputation today.
Alongside the easel paintings he was a working stage designer for the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, where he produced sets and printed programs for the Symbolist plays that defined Parisian theatrical avant-gardism in the 1890s, and a printmaker whose lithographs — especially the suite Paysages et intérieurs — extended his domestic vocabulary into colour print. He was also a sustained chronicler of his own social world: photographs and intimate portraits of the writers, painters, actors, and patrons of the Parisian Symbolist milieu run continuously through his work.
After 1900 the formal radicalism of the Nabis years gave way to a more naturalistic register. He took on a long sequence of portrait commissions and large decorative panels for private patrons and public buildings, and through the 1920s and 1930s produced the series of studio portraits of his fellow Nabis friends and of Maillol that he continued until late in his life. His move from the early experimental brilliance of the Nabis decade into this longer, quieter career has sometimes obscured the consistency of his project, but his late paintings extend rather than abandon the early ambition: they are still about the close attention paid to a single figure, in a particular room, in a specific quality of light.