The curtain motif links two worlds central to Vuillard’s life during the 1890s: his home environment and the theater. An abundance of patterned fabrics typically dominates his depictions of the house he shared with his mother and sister, both seamstresses. In this drawing, the woman with her hair in a chignon resembles Vuillard's sister and the piece of furniture behind her evokes a domestic setting; yet the scene also recalls a theater program Vuillard designed around the same time featuring a character emerging from behind a stage curtain.

Vuillard made this sketch on part of a larger sheet that, for over forty years, was folded and framed in such a way as to hide most of its surface—hence the darkening of the exposed section.

The theater box, where people went to be seen as much as to watch a performance, was a common subject in late nineteenth-century French painting—for instance in the work of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. Here, Vuillard directed his attention to the profile of a man he depicted twice, once in the box and again at the bottom of the page. An inscription on the sheet’s verso identifies him as Arthur Meyer (1844–1924), the director of the conservative, anti-Republican daily newspaper Le Gaulois (The Gaul). An avid theatergoer, often seen in the company of beautiful actresses, Meyer was frequently caricatured in the liberal press.

Vuillard painted few still lifes per se, but he included exquisite ones within depictions of family and friends at the breakfast or dinner table. In these works, objects often play a symbolic or metaphorical role, mirroring by their relative size or placement psychological tensions among the protagonists. Thus Vuillard may have planned to use this bowl, precariously positioned, off-center on the plate, to signal that something was amiss in the seemingly harmonious scene. In Vuillard’s domestic interiors, drama often lurks behind the elegant crockery.

Vuillard typically painted from memory, using his sketches as aide-mémoire. “I have enough to keep me busy for years on end developing and making artworks out of everything I have in my sketchbooks and folders,” he once wrote in his journal. A coffeepot resembling the one in this study appears in several of his pictures of breakfast tables. Vuillard’s intention to use the sketch for a painting is evident from the color notations inscribed on the sheet: vert (green), written twice next to the spout, and jaune (yellow), by the detail of the handle at the bottom of the page.

“I don’t make portraits,” Vuillard once declared, “I paint people at home.” No painting is known to correspond to this sketch, which shows a typical “portrait” as Vuillard conceived of them: more space and attention is devoted to the furniture and objects surrounding the sitter than to the figure herself. The aim was to capture his subject’s personality through a detailed evocation of her environment. During the last twenty-five years of his life, Vuillard’s notoriety rested primarily on such portraits, which were highly sought after by members of the Parisian uppermiddle class.

This sketch is one of many studies Vuillard made in preparation for two large decorative panels he painted in 1912−13 depicting the Place Saint-Augustin, a city square in Paris’s eighth arrondissement. Keen on showing a modernized Paris, the artist included new features of city life such as streetcars in the paintings. Here, he focused his attention on a Morris column, one of the cylindrical kiosks installed throughout the city beginning in the 1860s to display advertising, especially for theater and concerts.

While Vuillard devoted most of his early career to interior scenes, around 1900 he began to discover the pleasure of drawing outdoors. “I really enjoy being in the country,” he wrote that year. “I’m astonished to see the sky, by turns blue, grey, green, and that the clouds come in all sorts of different shapes and colors.” Although Vuillard rarely painted pure landscapes, his numerous sketches of trees, such as this one, became inspiration for the backdrops of large-scale decorations depicting gatherings in the countryside.

Toward the end of the First World War, Vuillard was commissioned by the French government to record life at the front. He was sent to Gérardmer, a town in the Vosges area, near the German border. Harboring anti-military feelings, Vuillard had no interest in glorifying soldiers in battle and may have found relief in sketching this tree with a view of the town beyond.

In 1925, Vuillard’s dealer Jos Hessel and his wife, Lucy, bought the Château des Clayes, a country estate near Versailles, about fifteen miles west of Paris. A frequent guest, Vuillard had his own room in the château and spent increasingly long stretches there during the last twelve years of his life. Both the château’s interior and exterior, with its characteristic round tower, inspired many drawings and paintings, as did the expansive surrounding park. After Vuillard’s death, during World War II, Les Clayes was requisitioned by the Nazis and subsequently burned and mostly destroyed by German troops at the end of the war.

In 1936, Vuillard was commissioned to provide a decoration on the theme of comedy for the entrance to the newly built Théâtre national de Chaillot in Paris. Setting the scene on the grounds of the Château des Clayes, he composed the vast painting like a stage. In the foreground, at left, are characters inspired by Molière—a marquis seducing an ingénue, perhaps from The Misanthrope; and at right, Titania and the donkeyheaded Bottom from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The final painting, still in place at the theater, is over eleven feet wide, showing Vuillard’s talent for developing monumental compositions from very small sketches.