The Sea at Vasouy

'The Sea at Vasouy,' painted by Vuillard in 1903, documents a rare excursion from his Parisian domestic territory to the Normandy coast near Honfleur—the village of Vasouy where he spent time with the Hessel family, who were among his most important patrons. The open sea was far from Vuillard's habitual pictorial subjects, and this coastal view represents his adaptation of his domestic observational method to an outdoor subject of greater scale and atmospheric drama. The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth holds this unusual Vuillard seascape.

Vuillard's approach to the sea retains his characteristic flattening of spatial depth—the water's surface treated as a pattern rather than an infinite recession. His abbreviated, close-observation brushwork adapts to the sea's larger scale, producing a work more interesting as a departure from his norm than as a demonstration of seascape mastery.