The feminine sphere
The interior is frequently depicted as the domain of the middle-class woman who, with servants to perform the household chores, filled her long, empty days with ‘silent rituals’ like reading, handicrafts or daydreaming.
With their floral dresses and vacant gaze, women of this kind sometimes merge entirely into their surroundings, as in Edouard Vuillard’s Interior with a Hanging Lamp. Men, too, appear in Nabis prints, lost in thought behind their newspaper or at the piano.
Edouard Vuillard, Interior with a Hanging Lamp (Intérieur à la suspension), 1899
Maurice Denis, Our Souls, with Languorous Gestures (Nos âmes en des gestes lents), 1899
Inner turmoil
In addition to the idyllic aspect of the interior as a place of silence and contemplation, printmakers sought to express the disturbing and unstable side of the interior.
The psychology of the time was already representing the human individual as a house, in which all manner of hidden feelings seethed away behind closed doors and shutters.
In his famous print series Intimités, Félix Vallotton showed the tensions that existed between men and women, trapped in the dark interiors of the bourgeoisie.
Félix Vallotton, The Irreparable (L'irréparable) from the series Intimités, 1898
Further reading
- Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France. Politics, Psychology and Style, The Hague 1989
- Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Intime Welten. Das Interieur bei den Nabis. Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Bern 1999
- Peter Parshall et al., The Darker Side of Light. Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900, London 2009