Jardin à l'Étang-la-Ville

Jardin à l'Étang-la-Ville of 1908 depicts the garden at the village of L'Étang-la-Ville in the western suburbs of Paris, where Vuillard spent time with the Hessel family and with his sister's family — the Roussels had a house there that became a regular destination. The Étang-la-Ville properties provided him with a specific suburban garden environment that was neither the rural countryside of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne nor the urban Paris of his apartment subjects but a middle landscape of suburban gardens with their characteristic mixture of domestic cultivation and semi-natural vegetation. His garden subjects from these suburban visits were among his most relaxed outdoor paintings, the familiar environment allowing him to apply his intimist method with the confidence of close acquaintance rather than the slightly provisional quality of his occasional excursions to more unfamiliar outdoor subjects.

The garden vegetation is rendered in layered mosaic strokes of green, yellow, and brown, the paths and garden architecture providing structural verticals and horizontals through the organic mass. Vuillard maintains his small-touch application throughout, treating foliage as a textile pattern of leaf shapes.