From 1891 through 1900, Vuillard was a member of the avant garde artistic group Les Nabis, creating paintings that assembled areas of pure color.

His interior scenes, influenced by Japanese prints, explored the spatial effects of flattened planes of color, pattern, and form.

After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, Vuillard adopted a more realistic style, approaching landscapes and interiors with greater detail and vivid colors.

[5] In November 1885, when Vuillard left the Lycée, he gave up his original idea of following his father in a military career, and set out to become an artist.

[4] Late in 1889, Vuillard began to frequent meetings of the informal group of artists known as Les Nabis, or The prophets, a semi-secret, semi-mystical club that included Maurice Denis and some of his other friends from the Lycée.

[citation needed] Serusier and his friend Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Paul Ranson, were among the first Nabis of nabiim, dedicated to transforming art down to its foundations.

The reviews were largely good, but the critic of Le Chat Noir wrote of "Works still indecisive, where one finds the features in style, literary shadows, sometimes a tender harmony."

The Japanese influence continued in his later, post-Nabi works, particularly in the painted screens depicting Place Vintimille he made for Marguerite Chaplin.

Vuillard created theatrical sets and programs, decorative murals and painted screens, prints, designs for stained glass windows, and ceramic plates.

In the course of his theater work, he met brothers Alexandre and Thadée Natanson, the founders of La Revue Blanche, a cultural review.

This method, originally used in Renaissance frescoes, involved using rabbit-skin glue as a binder mixed with chalk and white pigment to make gesso, a smooth coating applied to wood panels or canvas, on which the painting was made.

In 1892, Vuillard received his first decorative commission to make six paintings to be placed above the doorways of the salon of the family of Paul Desmarais.

The plates, along with his design for the Tiffany window and the decorative panels made for the Natansons, were displayed at the opening of Bing's gallery Maison de l'Art Nouveau in December 1895.

The paintings show a variety of different inspirations, including the medieval tapestries at the Hotel de Cluny in Paris that Vuillard greatly appreciated.

The faces and features of the figures in these scenes are rarely articulated in detail; instead Vuillard often places greater focus on the patterns and planes of wallpaper, carpets, and furnishings.

The figures include his grandmother, to the left, and his sister Marie, in the bold patterned dress that is a central feature of the painting.

He also placed a mirror on the wall to the left, a device which allowed him to give two points of view simultaneously and to reflect and distort the scene.

[21] In 1895, Vuillard received a commission from the cardiologist Henri Vaquez for four panels to decorate the library of his Paris house at 27 rue du Général Foy.

The primary subjects were women engaged in playing the piano, sewing, and other solitary occupations in a highly decorated bourgeois apartment.

[citation needed] The paintings, completed in 1896, were originally titled simply People in Interiors but later critics added subtitles: Music, Work, The Choice of Books, and Intimacy.

Dreyfus was a Jewish French army officer accused falsely of treason, and sentenced to a penal colony, before finally being exonerated.

[citation needed] The effects of the light became primary components of his paintings, whether they were interior scenes or the parks and streets of Paris.

[28] In May 1912, Vuillard received an important commission for seven panels, and three paintings above the doorways, for the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, including one of Guitry in his loge at the theater, and another of the comic playwright Georges Feydeau.

[30] In 1921, Vuillard received an important commission for decorative panels for the art patron Camille Bauer, for his residence in Basel, Switzerland.

In 1937, Vuillard received another major commission, along with Maurice Denis and Roussel, for a monumental mural at the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva.

[36] In 1900, Vuillard met Lucy Hessel, wife of a Swiss art dealer, who became his new muse, traveling with him each year to Normandy in July, August and September, and giving him advice.

[citation needed] The main painting of the commission, a large horizontal oval work depicting a busy café interior (currently privately owned and kept in secure storage in Geneva, Switzerland) was at the time the only one of the three known to still exist and to have been fully confirmed as a genuine Vuillard.

After submitting all the evidence to a committee at the secretive and highly conservative Wildenstein Institute in Paris, Tutt and the Fake or Fortune?

[38] On 13 November 2017, Misia et Vallotton à Villeneuve painted in 1899 became the most valuable Vuillard sold at auction when it achieved $17.75 million at Christie's.

[citation needed] In 2006, the National Gallery of Canada restituted Vuillard's The Salon of Madame Aron (1904, reworked in 1934), which it had purchased in 1956, to the Lindon family in France.