Les Collines bleues

Les Collines Bleues (The Blue Hills) of around 1900, at the Kunsthaus Zürich, is among Vuillard's more lyrical landscape paintings, the blue hills of the title evoking the hazy quality of a summer or late autumn day in which distance converts the greens of the far landscape into atmospheric blue. The Kunsthaus Zürich holds multiple Vuillard works that together represent the range of his practice from intimate interior subjects to the semi-rural landscapes he painted during his various stays outside Paris. The 'blue hills' motif connects Vuillard to a longer tradition of French landscape painting in which atmospheric distance was both a physical observation and a metaphor for longing, and to the Nabi interest in Japan's influence on compositional flatness and colour simplification.

The distant blue hills are rendered in broad flat colour areas with soft edges that blur their physical substance into atmospheric tone — consistent with Vuillard's Nabi approach to spatial representation through colour relationships rather than modelled form. The foreground is given more textural variety to establish spatial differentiation, and the overall colour harmony is orchestrated around the blue-green relationship.