Mère et Enfant au Jardin (Matin Dans Le Verger)

Mère et Enfant au Jardin (Morning in the Orchard) of 1910 combines the mother and child subject with the garden orchard setting — the morning light in an apple or pear orchard providing a specific seasonal and atmospheric context for the domestic figure subject. His garden subjects from the summer visits to country properties had evolved by 1910 into a relaxed, spatially open form quite different from his early Nabi flatness, and the orchard setting with its morning light would have given him chromatic material — the filtered light through fruit trees, the specific pale morning quality quite different from afternoon light — that he could organize through his characteristic attention to surface and color relationship. The mother and child in a specific orchard at a specific time of day represents his mature synthesis of figure subject, domestic environment, and landscape setting in an outdoor context that maintained the intimate quality of his enclosed interiors.

The orchard's fruit trees create dappled light and shadow that plays across the mother and child figures. Vuillard's oil handling in this outdoor setting is more animated and varied than in his confined interiors, with the varying density of the foliage above creating a complex pattern of light that enlivens the entire canvas.