Le tennis

Le tennis, painted in 1907, represents an unusual outdoor subject for Vuillard, whose art centered overwhelmingly on domestic interiors. The tennis court provided a setting of bourgeois leisure — the game was fashionable among the social class Vuillard observed — and gave him the opportunity to apply his Intimist formal approach to the patterns of outdoor sport rather than indoor domestic life. The Nabis had taken Gauguin's flat Synthetism and applied it to intimate modern subjects, and this tennis scene extends Vuillard's characteristic approach to the patterned surfaces and absorbed figures of leisure rather than work. The work demonstrates that his formal preoccupations could be applied to outdoor subjects as productively as to the domestic interiors that dominated his career.

Vuillard's outdoor technique applies his Intimist compression to the tennis court setting — the players and their white sports dress integrated with the court surface, surrounding vegetation, and summer light in the mosaic-like strokes of his characteristic approach. His palette in this outdoor setting is lighter and more varied than his interior work, though still dominated by the muted greens and neutral tones of his typical colorism.