Le Boulevard des Battignolles

Le Boulevard des Batignolles of around 1910 is one of Vuillard's most personal street subjects — the broad tree-lined boulevard in the 17th arrondissement where he had grown up and continued to maintain his studio and apartment for most of his career. The Batignolles neighborhood had historical resonance as the site of Manet's artistic circle in the 1860s — the Café Guerbois where Manet, Degas, Zola, and the young Impressionists gathered was in this neighborhood — and Vuillard's repeated attention to the boulevard connected his intimist practice to this bohemian history while transforming it into something more personal and domestic. Unlike the fashionable boulevards of the right bank, the Batignolles was solidly middle-class, its tree-shaded pavement populated by the ordinary Parisian bourgeoisie who were the subjects of his domestic interiors in their outdoor social movements. His treatment of the boulevard applies his indoor compositional principles to the street: the pedestrians dissolved into the chromatic atmosphere rather than asserting themselves as individually observed social types.

Vuillard applies his Intimist pattern-consciousness to the street setting, the pedestrians and building facades becoming elements in a chromatic composition rather than subjects of social observation. The spatial recession of the boulevard is compressed through his characteristic tonal continuity, foreground and background linked by shared colour values.