La villa Les Écluses à Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer

Painted in 1909 in tile medium (likely a distemper or tempera-based work on a tile support) and held at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, this work depicting a villa at Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer in Brittany shows Vuillard engaging with the Breton coastal landscape that attracted many Post-Impressionist painters. The villa as domestic architecture situated within a larger landscape allowed him to combine his characteristic interior concerns—the inhabited, humanized space—with the expansive exterior world of sea and coastal light.

The tile support lends the surface a smooth, slightly resistant quality that gives the paint a distinctive character. Vuillard renders the villa's architecture against coastal vegetation with precise, contained brushwork that articulates the structure while the surrounding natural forms are handled more loosely, preserving a tension between built and organic elements.