Édouard Vuillard, a key Nabi group member, captured iconic late 19th-century domestic scenes. His preparatory drawings, ranging from quick sketches to detailed studies, were vital for exploring his rendering of composition, light, and spatial arrangements. Our sheet provides the preparatory drawing for L’Intruse (fig. 1). Initially understood as a simple scene of an interior by Jacques Salomon, this painting has been reinterpreted by Patricia Ciaffa as a scene from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play L’Intruse.1 Premiering at the Théâtre d’Art in 1891, Maeterlinck’s play, featuring minimalist dialogue and an eerie atmosphere, captivated Parisian audiences. The sets, designed by the young Vuillard, added to the production’s striking visual appeal.
The unsettling presence of an invisible, uninvited figure in the Belgian play parallels the quiet, tense mood of Vuillard’s painting, whose grouping of figures seems to have inspired the composition of Edvard Munch’s Death in the Sickroom (fig. 2).2 Contemporary critics provided contrasting commentaries on Maeterlink’s creation of an eerie, ghostly silence during the play’s performance, with the stage and theatre being merely illuminated by the single lamp placed on stage. The actors’ dialogue, which was deemed barely audible, was similarly the recipient of mixed reviews.3 Vuillard’s composition, which he prepared on our sheet, perfectly reflects the play’s purely Maeterlinckian atmosphere: in the painting as well as in our drawing, passive figures rendered with continuous, ghostly traits of ink that remind of Munch’s graphic œuvre, blend into their tense, fearful surroundings.
