Jardin à l'Étang-la-Ville

Jardin à l'Étang-la-Ville depicts the garden at Étang-la-Ville, a commune near Versailles where Ker-Xavier Roussel — Vuillard's brother-in-law — had a property. Vuillard visited Roussel and his sister Marie repeatedly at this house and painted the garden and its surroundings in multiple works. The garden subject gave Vuillard a space between interior and landscape, enclosed and ordered like a room but subject to weather, light, and seasonal change, a transitional zone ideally suited to his interest in compressed, patterned space with filtered light.

The garden vegetation is rendered in layered mosaic strokes of green, yellow, and brown, the paths and garden architecture providing structural verticals and horizontals through the organic mass. Vuillard maintains his small-touch application throughout, treating foliage as a textile pattern of leaf shapes.