During the 1890s3„4Vuillard's greatest attachment, other than to his mother, to whom he was profoundly devoted, was to the young and capricious Misia Natanson, wife of one of3„4Vuillard's most important patrons, Thadee Natanson, for whom he did a series of decorative panels in 1895. By the turn of the century, the brilliant world that surrounded the Natansons and their journal, La Revue Blanche, had shifted its artistic and intellectual focus; the journal itself ceased publication in 1903, its demise hastened by Thadee's worsening finances. Perhaps an even harder blow for3„4Vuillard3„4was Misia's divorce from Thadee to remarry into quite a different world in 1905, this preceded by a troubled liaison with Alfred Edwards, an immensely rich and onerous man who hastened Thadee's financial collapse. As silent and withdrawn as3„4Vuillard3„4was by all descriptions, these events must have meant a great sea change in his life. Salvation came through another woman with whom he formed an attachment, perhaps even stronger than that with Misia. She was Lucie Hessel, wife of the art dealer Jos Hessel, who directed Bernheim-Jeune, one of the most successful galleries in Paris.

After the turn of the century Edouard and Lucie met nearly every day. Portraits of her and her friends, both formal and as elements in his interior genre scenes, proliferated. Her apartment on the rue de Rivoli and her houses at Versailles and in Normandy became his second homes and the source of much of his art. (Vuillard3„4died at the beginning of the war, attempting to reach her Norman house by train.) Lucie Hessel could not have been more different from Misia Natanson. She was tall, strong-jawed, and nearly Wagnerian in her ardent manner, in contrast to the sensuous and subtle Misia. Her world was grander and more conservative than that of the Revue Blanche group: less daring, more aristocratic. The evolution of3„4Vuillard's style3ƒ4particularly through the portrait commissions he received from the higher levels of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy 3ƒ4reflected, at least in part, this shift in his social milieu. Here Mme Hessel sits al a long table in her apartment on the rue de Rivoli. reading or perhaps opening her morning mail. She is still dressed in her peignoir. A large silver tray, holding a warming bell (for her coffee?) and a porcelain cup, shares the tabletop with a blooming Christmas cactus. A heavily shaded lamp projects from the left. Beyond her on a red plush banquette, intent upon his writing on a drop-leaf desk, is Lucie's (and3„4Vuillard's) close friend, Romain Coolus. These two figures3ƒ4Coolus a continuation of3„4Vuillard's earlier life, Lucie Hessel his new Egeria (the name given her by3„4Vuillard's friends for the muse like powers she had over him)3ƒ4share the picture-filled room with the intimacy of long friendship, each intent on his or her own task. Yet, despite its snug contentment, the interior is presented without the complex working of patterns and subtle spatial invocations of those small, most intimate pictures of the 1890s. The medium is laid on with fluidity and ease, a directness and a seeming absence of calculation, that signal a new stage in the evolution of3„4Vuillard's style.

The colours have become more brilliant3ƒ4the fuchsia of the blooming plant setting the tonality that reappears in the gradations of the lampshade, swift strokes gaily suggesting the images of the pictures on the wall, the shadows between the cushions on the banquette balancing the light blue of Mine Hessel's robe. And whereas Vuillard nearly always, even in the most completely developed pictures of the 1890s, painted with directness and with little or no build up, there is a new breadth here that suggests an easing away from the intellectual formulations of the Nabis into a less analytical spontaneity. Much is made of the exposed surface of the board that provides the middle tones throughout. As opposed to the quick-drying distemper paintings on this scale, which precede this picture, the oil here is rich and deliciously viscous, allowing him to go back to the paint3ƒ4as he did, for example, in defining the lace panels on the shoulders of Lucie's robe3ƒ4with the end of his brush. Further, the vague sense of mystery and the inexplicable, implied narratives of the earlier interiors with pools of light have ceased here. We are no longer entering the theatre in the middle of an act. Whereas the lamp is quickly suggested, it is not the light source even for Mine Hessel's work; the room is flooded with an undramatic, bright morning evenness. There is a new maturity here, in the world that Lucie Hessel made possible for Vuillard. The subtler and intellectually swifter world of Misia is behind him.

A new spontaneity has emerged; intimacy seemingly is now achieved without the burdens of probing into things that run too deeply. This is not to say that any of his powers have subsided. The open armchair in the right foreground, for example, presents as formidable a difficulty in formal spatial delineation as any problem he presented himself with earlier, but now he established it more loosely, allowing the form to dissolve onto the exposed board. Vuillard seems more able to relax, and perhaps even to celebrate the virtues of friendship and domestic calm, in a more accepting, less urgent manner.