Café au bois de Boulogne

Painted in 1897 on paper and held at the Besançon museum, this work depicts a café scene in the Bois de Boulogne, the great park on Paris's western edge that served as a social gathering place for all classes of Parisian society. Vuillard's choice of the Bois signals his engagement with outdoor leisure space as a counterpart to his indoor domestic scenes—both are theaters of Parisian bourgeois sociality. The open-air café setting with its dappled light and scattered figures represents the Nabis' interest in public parks as modern pastoral subjects.

Working in a mixed media on paper, Vuillard captures the dappled, broken light of the outdoor café through an irregular application of greens, cream, and earth tones. Figures are loosely indicated rather than fully described, their presence established through posture and color relationships rather than precise physiognomic detail.