The Terrace at Vasouy, the Garden

Vuillard made this distemper panel during one of his annual summer visits to Vasouy, the Normandy property of his friends Adam and Olga Natanson, editors of the influential Symbolist journal La Revue Blanche. By 1901 Vuillard had largely abandoned the tightly compressed domestic interiors of his Nabi period for more expansive outdoor subjects, yet his method remained unchanged: flat planes of colour pressed against one another, figures dissolved into foliage, architecture absorbed into pattern. The terrace at Vasouy offered precisely the bounded outdoor theatre he required — a walled garden between house and hillside that he could treat as an all-over decorative field rather than a perspective stage. His contemporaries Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard were also extending Nabi principles into garden and landscape subjects at this moment, though Denis moved toward more overtly religious symbolism while Bonnard pursued a warmer, more sensuous colour harmony. Vuillard's distemper technique — rabbit-skin glue mixed with powdered pigment — gave the surface a chalky, dusty radiance quite unlike oil, muffling depth and silencing the separation between figure and ground that would locate an Impressionist painting firmly in empirical space. The National Gallery's acquisition places this work in distinguished company among Vuillard's most ambitious decorative cycles.

Oil on canvas. By 1901 Vuillard's handling has gained breadth without losing chromatic density — the terrace's spatial recession is felt rather than strictly constructed, with warm and cool tones organising the depth relationship. Figure presence is suggested rather than described, consistent with his enduring Nabi instinct.