Interpretive Resource

Although much less known today than his contemporary Henri Matisse, Edouard Vuillard was among the most advanced and accomplished artists of his generation. Already at twenty-two, he had achieved a reputation among a circle of young writers, artists, and musicians whose aesthetic ideas showed the influence of the Symbolist and Synthetist theories of Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Gauguin, and Claude Debussy. Like many artists whose careers began after the last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, Vuillard experimented with the decorative arts and found an interested public for his lithographs, painted porcelain, stained-glass window designs, stage decors, book illustrations, and other alternatives to easel painting. However, most important for his earliest career were the commissions for large-scale paintings he received from members of his immediate social circle to decorate their urban apartment interiors.

The Art Institute is fortunate to have a stunning example of Vuillard’s work as a painter-decorator in the monumental painting Landscape: Window Overlooking the Woods. It was originally part of a decorative ensemble with its pendant, The First Fruits (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), in the Parisian apartment of Adam Natanson. His sons, Alexandre, Thadee, and Alfred, commissioned Vuillards first lithographs for their important literary magazine, La Revue Blanche, and gave him his first one-man show. This vast (12 x 9 feet) landscape painting was the third and last major project the artist executed for this family of enterprising men of letters.

In the Art Institutes painting, Vuillard extended the decorative potential of traditional landscape painting by transposing landscape into ornament. The landscape itself is conceived in massive, horizontal bands of lush, variegated greens that are accented by the verticals of poplars, rooftops, and a church steeple. Instead of creating an image one can imagine walking into, Vuillard framed his composition in a decorative border that redefines the viewer’s relationship to the landscape realm. The border and the broad patches of color owe much to woven tapestry designs, especially Flemish landscape tapestries of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. However, in this painting, Vuillard refrained from exaggerated stylization and the simplification of landscape elements. Indeed, Landscape: Window Overlooking the Woods is grounded in his appreciative observation of a real place; the rolling hills, white-washed houses, and rustic church seen here can still be found in a western suburb of Paris where he spent many a Sunday in the company of his sister and brother-in-law, the painter Ker Xavier Roussel.