Beneath the Trees

Beneath the Trees at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, painted in 1898, shows Vuillard in the garden setting he explored repeatedly during the summer months spent at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne or other country retreats. The dappled, filtered light beneath tree canopy was a specific atmospheric condition he returned to repeatedly — it provided the same kind of enveloping, pattern-dissolving quality that he found in the wallpapered interiors of Paris apartments. Beneath the trees, figures and foliage were equally subject to the fragmenting effects of moving, filtered light.

The dappled light beneath the tree canopy is rendered through contrasting warm and cool color patches applied with varied marks — a technique that creates a shimmering, unstable surface where neither figure nor foliage fully resolves into solid form. The overall color scheme of greens, yellows, and warm ochres evokes summer shade.