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	Edouard Vuillard France, 1868-1940 Madame Hessel, 1930 Distemper and pastel on paper 30 1/2 x 31 1/2 in. The Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection, 2000

After 1900, Vuillard's works became larger and more luminous, with more conventional three-dimensional perspective. The portraits and interiors of this period typically depict the private worlds of upper-middle class French society. Vuillard had achieved financial security through his art, and the one-time avant-gardist settled into a comfortable, bourgeois life.

Lucy Hessel was the wife of Jos Hessel, a partner in a prominent Parisian art-dealing firm, Bernheim-Jeune. Throughout Vuillard's final four decades, Madame Hessel was the artist’s closest friend, confidante, and muse, and Vuillard portrayed her frequently. In the present work, Madame Hessel appears in a room of the Chateau des Clayes near Versailles, which the Hessels had acquired in 1925 and which Vuillard frequently visited.

The figure in the background of this work may be one of Lucy Hessel's daughters.