The work depicts fellow artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec on holiday cooking in the kitchen at Les Relais, the country home of Vuillard's patron Thadée Natanson in the city of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, in north-central France.

Vuillard's painting captures Lautrec in a rare, sober state of mind, cooking his favorite dish of lobster while dressed in rain gear due to a recent storm.

In the 1890s, Vuillard often focused on interior, domestic scenes during his summer vacation, producing paintings depicting ordinary people engaging in everyday life.

The villégiature, or holiday, typically involved Parisians like Vuillard leaving the city in the summer and taking vacation in the countryside with close friends and family.

[1] In 1891, playwright and writer Pierre Veber (1869–1942) introduced Vuillard to his patron Thadée Natanson, who along with his brother Alfred ran La Revue Blanche, the leading art and literary magazine of its time.

[4] Vuillard and fellow artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) first met each other sometime in the early 1890s due to their association with La Revue Blanche,[5] with Lautrec first contributing artwork to the magazine in 1894.

[6] That same year, Vuillard received a decorative arts commission from Alexandre Natanson for installation in his home, requiring him to produce nine panels of scenes depicting French parks.

The next year, the Natansons rented Les Relais, a country estate in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where Vuillard and Lautrec continued their previous villégiature tradition from La Grangette.

300 guests were invited, with a claimed 2,000 cocktails served, all accompanied by side dishes of gourmet food, with Lautrec working diligently as the sole chef and bartender, dressed in a white linen jacket, complete with a freshly shaved bald head and no beard.

[12][10] Lautrec was part of a group of gourmands, initially formed by Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926), the historian of the Impressionists, and Claude Monet, who met up every Friday night for dinner at Drouant, a restaurant in the Palais Garnier neighborhood.