Paysage à l'Étang-la-Ville

Édouard Vuillard's 'Paysage à l'Étang-la-Ville' (Landscape at Étang-la-Ville, 1900) is a suburban landscape by the Nabi painter who was primarily celebrated for his intimate domestic interiors — his engagement with the suburban landscape of the Paris periphery (Étang-la-Ville was a village west of Paris near Saint-Germain-en-Laye) showed the breadth of his practice beyond the enclosed domestic world. His landscape subjects maintained the rich decorative quality and the intimist atmosphere of his interiors while opening to the outdoor world.

Vuillard renders the Étang-la-Ville landscape with his characteristic decorative intensity — the specific vegetation, the quality of the suburban landscape's light, and the spatial organization of the outdoor scene treated with the same richly patterned surface that characterized his domestic interiors. His handling flattens the landscape's spatial depth somewhat in favor of the decorative surface quality, the vegetation's patterns and the color relationships creating the composition's primary visual interest.