This was probably the first painting by Vuillard to enter a British collection. Vuillard gave it to the Scottish artist Charles Mackie and his wife Anne when they visited Paris in 1893. The women seen in profile in the painting worked for Vuillard’s mother in her corset and dress-making business. For a few years in the early 1890s Vuillard’s paintings became so highly patterned that they verged on abstraction. It is likely that his day-to-day contact with patterned materials through his mother’s work influenced his very intricate, decorative style of painting.

Quote from Google Arts & Culture