Café au bois de Boulogne

Café au bois de Boulogne at the Besançon museum, painted in 1897 on paper, depicts the open-air café culture of Paris's great western park — a social environment of mixed classes and purposes, from the aristocratic carriage rides of the Belle Époque to the popular Sunday excursions of working-class families seeking the city's green edge. Vuillard's 1897 treatment on paper gives the work a lighter, more sketchy quality than his more finished cardboard and canvas works — the medium suggesting a direct response to the specific conditions of the outdoor café setting, its dappled light and casual social arrangements. His choice of the Bois de Boulogne rather than the more fashionable Tuileries or Luxembourg gardens reflects his consistent preference for the slightly democratic, mixed social spaces of Paris over the more formally regulated public gardens of the center. The Besançon museum's French collection, assembled as part of the provincial French museum network, provides a regional context for a quintessentially Parisian subject.

Working in a mixed media on paper, Vuillard captures the dappled, broken light of the outdoor café through an irregular application of greens, cream, and earth tones. Figures are loosely indicated rather than fully described, their presence established through posture and color relationships rather than precise physiognomic detail.