Le Boulevard des Battignolles

Le Boulevard des Batignolles is one of Vuillard's relatively rare excursions into street painting, showing the Parisian boulevard near the neighbourhood where he grew up and continued to live well into his mature career. Painted around 1910, it reflects Vuillard's lifelong attachment to the 17th arrondissement's streets and their particular quality of bourgeois Parisian life — neither fashionable nor poverty-stricken, but dense with the ordinary texture of the city's middle class. The boulevard view is treated with the same decorative flattening that characterises his interior work.

Vuillard applies his Intimist pattern-consciousness to the street setting, the pedestrians and building facades becoming elements in a chromatic composition rather than subjects of social observation. The spatial recession of the boulevard is compressed through his characteristic tonal continuity, foreground and background linked by shared colour values.