Vuillard's father was a retired naval captain, twenty-seven years older than his mother. When the father died, Edouard was fifteen. His mother, a seamstress who ran a corset and dressmaking business from home, became the centre of his life and stayed there. They shared a series of small Parisian apartments until her death in 1928. He painted her more than five hundred times over four decades.

He joined the Nabis in the early 1890s, a group of young painters who took their name from the Hebrew word for prophets. The others (Bonnard, Denis, Serusier) were drawn to mysticism and esoteric philosophy. Vuillard was drawn to the interior. His mother's workroom, with its bolts of fabric, wallpaper patterns, and women in patterned dresses, became his subject. The paintings flatten space: the figure merges with the wallpaper, the dress dissolves into the upholstery, the room becomes a single surface of competing patterns. Critics called the approach Intimism.

He painted almost exclusively domestic scenes: rooms, tables, women sewing, women reading. The scale is modest. The colours are muted. There is no drama, no allegory, no mythology. The work assumes that a woman sitting in a chair in a room with good light is enough to make a painting, which it is.

He never married. He lived with his mother until she died and then lived alone. In the late twentieth century, historians began to reassess his decorative work (screens, murals, theatre sets for Lugne-Poe's Theatre de l'Oeuvre) and recognised that the small domestic paintings were not minor work but a deliberate programme: the interior as a subject equal to landscape or history.