Le jardin des Tuileries

Le jardin des Tuileries, painted in 1894 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, predates Vuillard's 1898 Yale version of the same subject and shows him at an earlier stage of his Nabi engagement with public garden spaces. The Tuileries in the 1890s were a democratic space — guards, nannies, children, bourgeois couples, and workers all sharing the formal allées — and Vuillard's version suppresses any sociological specificity in favour of chromatic pattern and the play of light through chestnut trees. The Orsay's collection contextualises this work alongside its Impressionist holdings, reminding viewers that Vuillard began his career as an heir to Impressionist observation before radically departing from its descriptive aims.

Oil or distemper on cardboard or canvas. An earlier, slightly less compressed handling than the 1898 Tuileries painting — space is still flattened but with some residual descriptive detail in the foreground. Colour is applied in thin washes rather than the more impastoed surface of his later works.