La crique

La crique, painted in 1901, is a small coastal scene — an inlet or creek — that applies Vuillard's Intimist vision to landscape subject matter. The Nabis had taken Gauguin's flat Synthetism and applied it to intimate modern subjects, and this coastal scene demonstrates how Vuillard extended his characteristic approach to natural subjects when his summer travels took him away from the Parisian domestic interiors that were his primary domain. The compression of pictorial space and the integration of near and far through flat strokes of muted color apply the same formal approach to the coastal landscape that served him so productively in his apartment interiors. The Museum of Art and History in Geneva holds this small work as part of its collection of French Post-Impressionist painting.

Vuillard's coastal scene applies his Intimist compression to landscape — near water, rocks, and vegetation integrated through the mosaic-like strokes of muted greens, blues, and earthy browns that flatten the spatial recession into a dense patterned surface. His outdoor palette in this coastal work is cooler and more varied than his interior canvases, but the fundamental approach of building form through accumulated small strokes of closely related tones remains entirely characteristic.