Landscape at Vaucresson

Landscape at Vaucresson of around 1900, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, depicts the outer Parisian suburb where Vuillard spent time with his close friend and patron Jos Hessel, whose family villa became a regular retreat. Vuillard's relationship with his patrons was unusually intimate: he was embedded in the bourgeois domestic world he painted, a permanent guest who documented the private spaces and social rituals of families who were both his subjects and his primary collectors. Vaucresson represented an intermediate territory between Paris and the country — a middle-class suburban landscape that Vuillard treated with the same absorbed attention he gave urban apartment interiors. LACMA holds this work as part of a French Post-Impressionist collection assembled to represent the Nabi and related movements.

The Vaucresson landscape is handled in Vuillard's characteristic late manner: broad areas of modulated colour applied with a paste-like consistency that gives the surface a matte tapestry-like quality. Trees and garden are described through shape and colour adjacency rather than linear contour, spatial organisation relying on colour temperature differences rather than tonal recession.