La maison de Roussel à La Montagne

La Maison de Roussel à La Montagne of around 1900, at the Hermitage Foundation, depicts the house of Vuillard's brother-in-law K.-X. Roussel, a fellow Nabi painter who remained one of Vuillard's closest companions throughout his life. The house at La Montagne — a rural retreat from Paris — appears in several Vuillard works from around this period, each one exploring the relationship between built structure and surrounding vegetation from a slightly different vantage or season. Vuillard's paintings of Roussel's house belong to the broader Nabi interest in the decorated domestic environment as a vehicle for artistic ambition, taking the modest rural house as a subject worthy of the same formal attention as any historical or mythological subject.

The house and garden are rendered in Vuillard's characteristic interlocking colour areas where the boundary between architecture and vegetation is deliberately blurred. The building's facade is visible through gaps in foliage rather than presented as a full architectural elevation, and the paint surface — warm, textured, homogeneous — unifies all elements into a continuous decorative field.