Black Dress 1920

Édouard Vuillard probably made this painting of a woman in a black dress with oil on cardboard sometime around the turn of the 20th century. It is an image that participates in a broader fin-de-siècle interest in representing modern women, like the flâneurs of Paris, who occupied and defined the new spaces of bourgeois leisure. We see a woman, possibly the artist’s sister, framed by an idyllic garden background. She wears a rather severe black dress. While the naturalistic setting could be read as a symbol of freedom, the woman’s dark clothing suggests the social constraints of the time. Her upward gaze, and the positioning of the trees behind her, makes her seem trapped, as if in a cage. The work of social historians can help us to further explore these tensions and the complicated social situation of women in France at the turn of the century.