Interpretive Resource

Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Maurice Denis—members of a group of vanguard artists called the Nabis—were responsible for the revival of decorative painting in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Their aim was twofold: to redefine the artwork as an arrangement of line and color that could function as a visual equivalent for nature, ideas, and emotions; and to restore painting to its traditional role as an integral element in an interior.

An extremely versatile artist, Vuillard produced lithographs and created designs for porcelain, stained-glass windows, stage decors, and book illustrations, in addition to executing oil paintings. He also received important commissions from members of his social circle for large-scale canvases to decorate the interiors of their urban apartments. Landscape: Window Overlooking the Woods is one of a pair (the other is in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) painted for the wealthy Parisian banker Adam Natanson.

Here, Vuillard played with the traditional description of an easel painting as a "window onto the world,"redefining the viewer’s relationship with the landscape realm and composing the scene so that the bottom edge of the canvas represents a window frame. The borders on the other three sides evoke the festoon motif that commonly appears along the edges of late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century tapestries. Vuillard’s muted palette also links this modern mural to tapestry traditions, while its ambitious scale reflects the artist’s experience with theatrical design and panoramas. Although Vuillard simplified his forms and organized them into a series of horizontal bands, he retained a belief in direct observation of nature. Landscape: Window Overlooking the Woods represents a real place, the area around Etang-la-Ville, a suburb west of Paris where Vuillard often visited his sister, Marie, and her husband, the painter Ker Xavier Roussel.