Imbued with a veiled intensity both psychological and formal (witness the cluttered array of vessels on the table) this highly charged portrait of, from left to right Vuillard's grandmother, sister Marie, and mother (with a standing servant appearing behind them at an open door) defines the complexity of "the sense of intense privacy, almost of a secret language, that hangs over the Vuillard family" (E. Easton, op.cit., p. 58) and which Ms. Easton links inextricably with the Symbolist aesthetic of which Vuillard was a paramount practitioner. She defines this painting as "the most representative of Vuillard's depictions of his family dining" and comments extensively on Vuillard's mastery of illumination:

Thus, the lamp in Family of the Artist is not the principal source of light for the composition since it highlights Mme.
Vuillard's face but not her torso, leaves Vuillard's grandmother
entirely in shadow, and casts capricious light on Marie and
Vuillard. Instead, the back wall is bathed in light from a
candle that remains almost invisible to the viewer.... In
The Vuillard Family at Lunch the overhead lamp commands
attention but sheds no light. In his journals Vuillard
provided an oblique explanation for these phenomenon in his
observations of everyday objects around him:

'One lives surrounded by decorated objects. In the
most ordinary interior, there's not an object the form of
which doesn't have an ornamental precision--and most of the
time the form hides its function from us under these
irrelevant embellishments.'

The window is the source of light in The Vuillard Family
at Lunch that illuminates Mme. Vuillard's face and hands and
traces a path along the table toward the viewer. The light
also reduces Vuillard's grandmother to a rather grotesque
caricature by highlighting the extremities of her profile.
Although we know by the indication of daylight that this is
lunchtime, the painting has a dark, brooding mood....

This painting of the Vuillard family dining is built on a
structure that, although still relying on a mixture of patterns, is darker, denser, and more claustrophobic.

The background is a succession of vertical panels of equal
width across the canvas, sometimes formed arbitrarily, as on
the left where Vuillard introduced a vertical ray of light.
The table that occupies the foreground space is tipped toward
the viewer, although the perspective of objects on the table
varies: the plate with a drumstick in the extreme foreground
--perhaps at Vuillard's place--is depicted as if the viewer were standing directly above it, while the three carafes of wine
farther back are seen head-on. The painter further confused
the space by making the carafe of red wine appear to be behind
and above the bottle of white wine or water in the foreground.
It is as if Vuillard, standing uncomfortably close to the motif, made use of a shifting point of view--looking down at his
own place setting and looking across the table at his sister.
(Ibid., pp. 62-65)

This painting will be included in the forthcoming Vuillard catalogue raisonné being prepared by Antoine Salomon and Annette Leduc Beaulieu from the records and under the responsibility of Antoine Salomon.