La treille à Saint-Germain

La treille à Saint-Germain by Maurice Denis from 1904, held in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, depicts a vine-covered trellis or pergola in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the elegant town west of Paris where Denis lived. Denis frequently painted his own garden and domestic surroundings at Saint-Germain, finding in the carefully tended bourgeois garden a subject perfectly suited to his synthesis of Nabi decorativeness and Symbolist spirituality. A vine-laden trellis, with its filtering of light through leaves and the play of shadow on the ground beneath, gave him a subject that combined the domestic and the quasi-sacred — a green enclosure suggesting both garden paradise and the sacred grove of Christian allegory.

Denis applies his characteristic rhythmic patterning to the vine's foliage, using flattened, curved forms and a saturated green palette that approaches decorative surface. The filtering of light through the trellis is rendered through alternating passages of warm and cool shadow, maintaining spatial depth within the flat decorative scheme.