La maison de Roussel à La Montagne
Édouard Vuillard·1900
Historical Context
La Maison de Roussel à La Montagne of around 1900, at the Hermitage Foundation, depicts the house of Vuillard's brother-in-law K.-X. Roussel, a fellow Nabi painter who remained one of Vuillard's closest companions throughout his life. The house at La Montagne — a rural retreat from Paris — appears in several Vuillard works from around this period, each one exploring the relationship between built structure and surrounding vegetation from a slightly different vantage or season. Vuillard's paintings of Roussel's house belong to the broader Nabi interest in the decorated domestic environment as a vehicle for artistic ambition, taking the modest rural house as a subject worthy of the same formal attention as any historical or mythological subject.
Technical Analysis
The house and garden are rendered in Vuillard's characteristic interlocking colour areas where the boundary between architecture and vegetation is deliberately blurred. The building's facade is visible through gaps in foliage rather than presented as a full architectural elevation, and the paint surface — warm, textured, homogeneous — unifies all elements into a continuous decorative field.
Look Closer
- ◆The Roussel house at La Montagne is partially dissolved into the surrounding vegetation — Vuillard treats architecture as another pattern element among foliage and shadow.
- ◆The cardboard support gives this small work a different surface texture from his canvas paintings — paint sits more dryly, with visible grain.
- ◆Warm ochre of the house walls is echoed in the dried autumn grasses below — built structure and natural terrain unified by shared colour.
- ◆A door or window opening is implied as a darker rectangle in the facade, but never explicitly drawn — just a tonal shift in the wall.
- ◆The sky is absent or nearly absent — the painting is all house, garden, and trees, the enclosing domestic world typical of Vuillard's landscape subjects.
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