Foliage—Oak Tree and Fruit Seller

Foliage — Oak Tree and Fruit Seller of 1918 shows Vuillard during the First World War years engaging with an outdoor subject that combined natural and commercial elements — the market seller beneath an oak tree creating a scene of Paris's continued civic life despite the conflict. Vuillard had been too old for military service but was not indifferent to the war: he made visits to the front as a sort of official painter, and the domestic and outdoor subjects he continued to paint through the war years carried a quality of sustained attention to ordinary life that had its own political meaning as a form of civil witness. The oak tree as a subject connected to the long tradition of French landscape painting while the fruit seller brought the everyday commercial life of Paris — unchanged by the distant war — into the composition. His treatment of the foliage canopy above the figure would have occupied his particular attention: the filtered light through leaves creating the dappled, patterned surface that was most analogous to his domestic interiors among all outdoor subjects.

Vuillard's distemper technique creates a flat, chalky surface that is ideally suited to large decorative formats. The oak's foliage is rendered in complex overlapping layers of green and brown that fill the upper two-thirds of the composition, while the fruit seller below provides a warm note of human scale against the tree's organic abundance.