Woman in the garden.

Woman in the Garden from 1891 sits at the heart of Vuillard's Nabi formation — the year in which the group, including Bonnard, Denis, and Sérusier, were producing their most radical explorations of flat colour and decorative surface. The woman in question is absorbed into the garden rather than portrayed within it: Vuillard's visual strategy at this period denied the figure any special privilege over its surroundings, treating everything — dresses, flowers, grass, shadows — as coloured pattern. Now in museum storage, this work represents a difficult moment in Vuillard's reception: early Nabi paintings spent decades undervalued before the twentieth century's reassessment.

Oil or distemper on canvas or board. The picture plane is treated as a flat surface on which colour patches are arranged rather than a window onto three-dimensional space. Outline is suppressed, forms merge into one another, and the figure is identifiable by clothing colour rather than facial presence.