L'Etang-la-Ville. La gare

L'Etang-la-Ville was a village west of Paris where Vuillard spent time in the early 1900s, and this view of its train station belongs to a group of outdoor works exploring the suburban zones between the capital and the countryside — spaces that industrial modernity was still in the process of shaping. The railway held ambiguous significance in Post-Impressionist landscape: it brought Paris within reach but also disrupted older rural rhythms, and Vuillard's treatment is typically oblique, refusing to celebrate or condemn. Kunstmuseum Basel, which holds this work, has consistently prioritized Post-Impressionist decorative painting alongside historical masters in its collection.

Vuillard treats the station architecture with the same flattening tendency he applies to interiors, dissolving building, platform, and surrounding vegetation into a surface of ochre, grey, and pale green. The absence of a strong horizon line reinforces the Nabi refusal of conventional perspectival recession.