The Sea at Vasouy

Vuillard's 1903 view of the sea at Vasouy represents a genuine departure from his Parisian domestic territory — the Normandy coast near Honfleur was far from the apartments and drawing rooms that constituted his usual pictorial world. He visited Vasouy as a guest of Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, dealers who were crucial to his commercial success, and the Hessel family, who owned a summer property in the region. The open Atlantic was a different kind of pictorial problem from his compressed domestic interiors: scale, horizon, the restless mobility of sea and cloud all challenged the close-range observational method he had developed for furniture, wallpaper, and domestic light. His Nabi training under Paul Sérusier had emphasized surface and pattern over spatial illusion, and this canvas shows him adapting that tendency to an outdoor subject of considerable atmospheric drama. Monet, Boudin, and Courbet had all painted the Norman coast with mastery; Vuillard's approach is necessarily less assured in this unfamiliar territory, but the canvas retains the distinctive tonal compression and non-hierarchical surface treatment that marks all his work. The Hood Museum at Dartmouth holds this rare Vuillard seascape as a document of his range.

Vuillard's approach to the sea retains his characteristic flattening of spatial depth—the water's surface treated as a pattern rather than an infinite recession. His abbreviated, close-observation brushwork adapts to the sea's larger scale, producing a work more interesting as a departure from his norm than as a demonstration of seascape mastery.