Beneath the Trees

Beneath the Trees of 1898 is a landscape subject from the summers Vuillard spent at country properties with the Natanson family and other friends in the late 1890s. The sous-bois motif — figures or a view beneath a tree canopy — was one he returned to throughout his landscape work, finding in the filtering of light through leaves an outdoor equivalent of the patterns he pursued indoors. The 1898 date places this during his most intense association with the Revue Blanche circle at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where the Natanson property and its gardens provided him with outdoor subjects he could treat with his characteristic pattern-consciousness. His treatment of trees and foliage combined direct observation of the specific leafy environment with his formal instinct for organizing the visual field as an interlocking pattern of color marks rather than as an atmospheric description of space. The figures or spatial view beneath the trees would have been organized through the same democratic attention to all elements of the visual field that governed his domestic subjects.

The dappled light beneath the tree canopy is rendered through contrasting warm and cool color patches applied with varied marks — a technique that creates a shimmering, unstable surface where neither figure nor foliage fully resolves into solid form. The overall color scheme of greens, yellows, and warm ochres evokes summer shade.