Walking in the Vineyard

Walking in the Vineyard is a landscape subject from Vuillard's summer travels, depicting figures moving through a vineyard. The vineyard — with its regimented rows of vines, its agricultural regularity, its seasonal change — offered a landscape type very different from the sub-bois or the seacoast subjects he more typically painted on summer visits. Vineyard landscapes carry cultural associations with rural France, wine, and the deep-rooted agricultural civilisation that Post-Impressionist painters, following Gauguin, associated with an authentic relationship to the land unavailable in the city.

The regular geometry of the vine rows creates a structural grid through the composition that Vuillard uses to organise the figures walking within it. The open outdoor light gives a different quality from his interiors, with the palette lighter and more varied. Brushwork is relatively free and direct in the outdoor foliage.