Landscape: Window Overlooking the Woods

Painted in 1899 in canvas and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this work presents the landscape view through a window—a compositional device that Vuillard, like Bonnard, used repeatedly as a way of framing nature as a picture-within-a-picture. The window mediates between the interior domestic space the artist inhabits and the exterior world of woods and open sky, and this mediation is Vuillard's subject as much as the landscape itself. By 1899 he was moving between Paris and the Île-de-France countryside regularly, finding wooded landscapes as rich in pictorial possibility as urban interiors.

The window frame structures the composition as a strong horizontal and vertical grid against which the loosely painted wooded landscape is seen. Interior tones—warm, contained, domestic—contrast with the more variously lit greens and blues of the exterior, and Vuillard exploits this contrast to explore the psychology of the threshold between inside and outside.