Interior with Pink Wallpaper III (1899): Art, History and Details

Interior with Pink Wallpaper III (1899) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The optical beauty of the patterning and luscious color of Interior with Wallpaper I, II, and III distracts from their ambivalent undercurrents. Across the three sheets, Vuillard creates an airless enclosure in which the wallpaper replicates itself, metastasizing across the surface and threatening the figures partially glimpsed through interior doors. Hidden figures recur in Vuillard’s work, adding an element of the uncanny to familiar settings.

Object facts

• Title: Interior with Pink Wallpaper III
• Date: 1899
• Creator attribution: Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868–1940)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: color lithograph
• Dimensions: Sheet: 39.2 x 34 cm (15 7/16 x 13 3/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Lithograph
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1951.65.8

A detail from the museum

Pattern and textile are paramount in Vuillard’s interiors, likely inspired by the many fabrics he would have encountered within his seamstress mother’s domestic atelier.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chapin, Mary Weaver. “Interior Dramas.’” In Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889-1900. Mary Weaver Chapin and Heather Lemonedes Brown, 40-93. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.