The Garden at Amfreville

The Garden at Amfreville, painted in 1905, shows Vuillard visiting the Normandy coast, a region increasingly popular with Parisian painters seeking relief from the city. By 1905 Vuillard had largely left his Nabi radicalism behind, moving toward a more relaxed, observed manner while retaining his attention to surface and pattern. Amfreville, a small Norman village, provided him with the kind of enclosed domestic garden that had always suited his sensibility — spaces defined by walls or hedges rather than open vistas, where intimacy could be preserved even outdoors. This work's current location is unrecorded, suggesting it has passed through private hands.

Oil on canvas. The transition from Vuillard's Nabi period toward his later manner is visible in the more naturalistic spatial recession and the less aggressive pattern-making. Colour remains richly complex, but forms are more volumetrically rendered than in the flattened Nabi works of the 1890s.