Walking in the Vineyard

Walking in the Vineyard of 1897 is a landscape subject with figures — possibly from one of the country house stays that punctuated Vuillard's Parisian career throughout the 1890s and 1900s. His landscape work was always secondary to his domestic interiors but gained momentum during the years of his close association with the Natanson family at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where the riverside property and its gardens provided him with outdoor subjects quite different from the enclosed Parisian rooms of his signature work. The vineyard setting — the structured rows of vines, the figured landscape of agricultural organization — gave him a subject combining the natural and the cultivated in a way that suited his sensibility: neither pure nature nor pure architecture but the humanized natural landscape that his intimist method could organize through its characteristic pattern-consciousness.

The regular geometry of the vine rows creates a structural grid through the composition that Vuillard uses to organise the figures walking within it. The open outdoor light gives a different quality from his interiors, with the palette lighter and more varied. Brushwork is relatively free and direct in the outdoor foliage.