Woman in a Striped Dress by Edouard Vuillard depicts a woman tending to a vase of flowers and wearing a bold dress. The color of the stripes of her dress bleeds into the background, making dark red the overwhelming color in this painting. The subject is the woman, but I found it interesting that her side profile is less detailed than the woman next to her. At first, I actually thought that the woman was standing next to a mirror, and that the other woman was her reflection. The overall murkiness of the painting was confusing to me in the beginning. 

The emphasis is on the dress she’s wearing with contrasting stripes. The rest of her outfit and her body are very vague (not painted at all, actually); we only see one of her hands. The woman doesn’t look at the viewers. Instead, her attention is on the flowers, her head and gaze tilted down. Vuillard paints the plants mostly dull green, possibly to not detract from the bright colors of the woman and her dress. There is a singular bright red flower, and then a cluster of contrasting black/brown and white flowers. There seems to be a box by her hand, and a girl dressed in a golden dress in the upper left. There’s no floor or background, so the girl appears to be either floating or standing behind the two women. The girl’s facial features are just a smudge; Vuillard paints her with almost entirely shades of yellow.