Paysage à l'Étang-la-Ville

Paysage à l'Étang-la-Ville of 1900 depicts the suburban landscape of the village that was the location of his sister Marie Vuillard's property — the garden and countryside of the western Parisian suburbs that he visited regularly through his association with the Roussel family. His Étang-la-Ville subjects form a specific geographic cluster within his landscape work, the suburban village's particular combination of cultivated gardens and semi-natural countryside providing a consistent outdoor subject environment that complemented his Parisian domestic interiors. The 1900 date places this in the early years of his expanded social world — the Hessel connection was just beginning to give him access to grander properties — and the Étang-la-Ville landscape shows his intimist method applied to a familiar suburban subject with the confidence of close acquaintance.

Vuillard renders the Étang-la-Ville landscape with his characteristic decorative intensity — the specific vegetation, the quality of the suburban landscape's light, and the spatial organization of the outdoor scene treated with the same richly patterned surface that characterized his domestic interiors. His handling flattens the landscape's spatial depth somewhat in favor of the decorative surface quality, the vegetation's patterns and the color relationships creating the composition's primary visual interest.