The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.
The glow that illuminates Madame Vuillard’s face is also visible on the middle section of the broomstick, where her left hand holds it. There, the brushwork reveals something elemental: her power to enliven the inanimate through the intimacy of work. Her grasp has not turned the broom into a lightsaber; nothing supernatural has occurred. It is simply that through perpetual use the wood has come to appear less lifeless.
This change permeates the room. It is there in Madame Vuillard’s clothing, well chosen and cared for: the neatness of her rich damask housecoat of rust and black, the snowy ruffle of her blouse poking through the housecoat’s neck and sleeves. It is there in that hardto-make-out black leather shoe that peeks from under her hem, and in her French braid with not a strand of silvery brown hair out of place. The room’s embellishments—the wallpaper, the framed paintings, even that little elegant brass doorknob on the richly grained brown door—suggest a space that has evolved with keen, artisanal patience over years.
Every crevice is bursting with her life. The interior does not simply belong to her, it is her. Everything therein sensuously affirms it. The wallpaper’s heavy reddish brown, ocher, and black seem to culminate in the swell of her striped housecoat. The bed, the chest of drawers, and the open door reflect the expansive gentleness of her presence. Camouflaged by her possessions, she can disappear into her task without relinquishing her personality, because her home, designed so completely in her own image, will always reassert it.
It is as though all the work done by her hands—the sweeping, the dusting, the polishing, the arranging and rearranging of decorations and heavy furniture, day in and day out—is a sort of kindling, a lovingness that these things absorb.
My father’s mother, with whom I lived half the time while growing up, did not at all resemble Madame Vuillard, and yet the first time I encountered Vuillard’s painting, in the library of the university in Mona, Jamaica, where I was a student, I found in it an intimate portrait: of her strict, indefatigable regime of daily sweeping, and much else of what I know and do not know about her. I saw my grandmother every morning with her broom in hand. The swish it made often woke me as she went throughout her four-room house with its polished red floor, from her bedroom at the very back to the veranda. In the evenings she worked in the reverse order. She did not sing or hum as she swept, nor did she break off sweeping to talk or wield the broom to raise me from the bed or the sofa where I watched her.
My grandmother was short and solid-built. She was energetic about the house, and doubly so in the kitchen, as her profession was baking. She baked on Thursdays and Fridays, mostly unaided, for the Saturday market. On baking days, the usual quiet of the house gave way to the oven’s ferocious heat; out of its roar and crackle and the shushed hiss when it opened, above the clatter of pans and metal mixing basins, I would sometimes hear my grandmother’s voice seething with sounds of jubilation. She beamed whenever a
