Stamped E.Vuillard lower right, this pastel on paper by Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940) is titled Femme entrant dans le salon, c. 1896.

In 1890 Edouard Vuillard attended his first meeting of Les Nabis (The Prophets), a group of young artists in Paris who sought to reinvigorate the art of painting. Inspired by the example of Paul Gauguin, the Nabis consciously rejected academic traditions, intentionally painting in a non-naturalistic style, with bold flat areas of colour, emphasising the two-dimensional and decorative qualities of their paintings.

For Vuillard, the interiors of his family home provided the setting for his most compelling works of the 1890s. He grew up surrounded by women: his mother was a corset maker, with the family apartment doubling as her workshop and constantly filled with seamstresses, as well as his sister and grandmother. He made many small-scale pictures of women going about their daily tasks, five of which were exhibited at the third Exposition des peintres impressionnistes et symbolistes in 1892, where they were praised for their perceptiveness and subtlety, earning him the label intimiste.

Exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, in 1991–92 and published in the definitive Salomon & Cogeval catalogue raisonné of Vuillard's paintings and pastels, this work carries an exceptional exhibition and literature history for a work on paper of this period. Collectors of Les Nabis, French intimiste painting, and Vuillard's 1890s domestic interiors will find this a museum-exhibited, fully published example.