Christmas Tree Interior — French School

A festive oil-pastel interior glowing with the warmth of a Christmas gathering, rendered in luminous, freely-worked colour.

France, circa 1930s.

Domestic festive scenes flourished in French popular and fine art of the early twentieth century as middle-class ritual and bourgeois interiority became valid subjects in their own right. The intimisme of Vuillard and Bonnard found echoes in countless unsigned pastels of the period, where the medium's velvety surface could conjure candlelight, tinsel and pine in equal measure.

Oil pastel on paper. Sheet size approximately 65× 81cm (portrait). Good condition with minor edge wear.