Public Gardens

Painted in 1894 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, this sequence of decorative panels depicting public gardens belongs to the major commission Vuillard received for the apartment of Alexandre Natanson — brother of Thadée and co-founder of La Revue Blanche. The nine Public Gardens panels, painted in distemper, represent Vuillard's most ambitious early decorative achievement and his most sustained engagement with the outdoor public world beyond domestic interiors. The Luxembourg Gardens and Tuileries provided settings where bourgeois women and children moved through spaces of regulated public leisure that Vuillard transformed into flattened tapestries of colour and pattern.

The decorative panel format invited a large-scale adaptation of Nabi principles — the flattening of space, the equivalence of figure and pattern, the suppression of shadow in favour of colour zone. The distemper medium gives the panels their characteristic matt, fresco-like surface that integrates with the domestic architectural setting for which they were designed.