Orchard

Painted in 1897, this small panel belongs to the Nabi years, when Vuillard and his friends Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Ker-Xavier Roussel were recasting the intimate spaces of domestic life and the suburban garden in a decorative, flattened pictorial language. Gardens, parks and the edges of Paris were recurring subjects for him in this decade: he had grown up with his mother at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and later took a studio in the western suburbs, and he treated the small green spaces around the city as stages for quiet, close-toned observation. The museum notes that the loose, organic strokes of the trees contrast with the linear divisions of the agricultural land, and sets the picture beside a passage by the artist’s friend and muse Misia Natanson recalling a walk beside the river “past high silver birch trees.” The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art.