This image of three figures caught in a love triangle was inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting and lithograph, Jealousy, though Robert has changed Munch’s focus on two male rivals to a focus on two female rivals. Robert’s image is unusual and further departs from Munch in that the figures fill all available pictorial space. There is no background, no landscape, no sense of location. Whatever is happening is all in the woman’s mind, hence the title “Interior.” Robert’s image is not limited to a single emotion. While his flawed heroine, in the foreground, is jealous of the wife whose husband she is sleeping with, she also sympathizes with the wife. She feels a conflict of loyalties. Interior serves as an allegory for the psychology of mixed and conflicted emotions that are impossible to express.

The brooding woman’s face in plunged in deep shadow, with one eye peeking out furtively–a victim of her own obsession. Robert often used monochrome, high contrast images that utilized dramatic lighting effects. As his confidence and mastery of watercolour grows, Robert begins to play with contrasts of soft focus and sharp focus seen here in the skin and hair. The image began as a photo collage and was then transferred to paper by drawing with the aid of a grid. Robert deliberately let his underlining grid lines show through parts of his painting, allowing his process to be visible as part of the finished product. Robert’s friend and fellow artist Jean Coutts posed for the wife, seen in the background here.