Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Public Park

In subject, compositional arrangement, and even dramatic tension, Ker-Xavier Roussel’s Public Park echoes aspects of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, a clear precursor painted only a few years earlier.

Primarily a painter of everyday life—and, later, mythological subject matter—Roussel worked as a muralist, designer, and printmaker. He was also brother-in-law and close friend to painter Edouard Vuillard. Both men were members of the artistic circle known as the Nabis, a Hebrew word meaning “prophet” attributed to them by the poet and painter Henri Cazalis, who saw these Post-Impressionist artists as prophets of modern art and their work as a challenge to established artistic traditions. 

Nabi Works from the Art Institute’s Collection

Roussel attended the Académie Julian, a private art school in Paris for students of painting and sculpture noted for being more liberal than the famed École des Beaux-Arts. It was there, at the Académie Julian, that painter Paul Sérusier founded the Nabi group in 1888 after meeting with Paul Gauguin. Gauguin’s scenes of the Breton region, with their bold, flat patches of color based on emotion and sensation rather than descriptive reality, were immensely influential for the Nabis.

While Nabi artists had a predilection for setting their paintings indoors, they were hardly cloistered from their broader surroundings and, as young well-educated Parisians, often found their subjects in the city around them. Their interest in both interior and exterior settings has led scholar Heather Lemonedes Brown to argue that the Nabis “domesticized” the city by bringing interior activities and family life outside of the home and integrating them into urban life, precisely as Roussel has done with Public Park. Despite its outdoor setting, Roussel’s scene exhibits a sense of intimate and even claustrophobic confinement that can be found in the interior imagery of his contemporaries, including Vuillard, Bonnard, Vallotton, and Denis.

More than three and half feet wide, the relatively large Public Park depicts a group of women along with two children in the Tuileries. The women sew, read, or sit contemplatively, while a little girl in a bright-red and polka dot dress plays with a hoop. Notably, none of the figures meet the gaze of the viewer—or each other; they are instead absorbed in their various tasks or sit quietly at rest. In the far distance, an almost toylike bright-red omnibus with comical figures facing frontally in military fashion can just barely be seen behind the trees.

Although Roussel would have been only 19 when Seurat’s monumental park scene was shown in 1886 and 1887, as an urbane aspiring artist he was undoubtedly aware of the painting and its significance to modern art. Certain details in Roussel’s painting are strikingly similar to Seurat’s, such as a little girl in red, seen to the top right of Seurat’s canvas but who takes on a more prominent role in Roussel’s rendition.

Equally, the fixed and rigid pose of the foregrounded seated woman in profile in Roussel’s Public Park mimics the posture of several figures in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. This aspect of both paintings’ style harkens back to the hieratic aesthetics of ancient Egyptian art and early Greek sculpture, even as Roussel and Seurat took their subjects from modern life.

In Roussel’s park scene, the planes of vibrant color, crowded arrangements, and juxtaposition of textures and patterns also underline a contemporary interest in Japanese designs fueled by the country’s opening to the West in 1853. The flat blocks of color, bold contours, and intricate patterns of Japanese woodblock prints were especially impactful on French aesthetics of this period, as modern artists, and Gauguin and his circle especially, looked to other cultures for ways to reinvent Western European art. Roussel, who was not just a painter but also a lithographer, took inspiration from the many woodblock prints circulating in France at that time.

Roussel’s scene also shares with Seurat’s monumental canvas a dispassionate observation of the people who inhabit the public park, though Roussel’s is semibiographical. At the time he conceived the composition, the artist had just married Marie Vuillard, Edouard Vuillard’s older sister, and was living with her family in a cramped apartment near the Tuileries Gardens. In this scene, Marie, the largest figure, seen in profile at far left, stares stoically in the general direction of her mother, who looks downward, refusing her eye contact. By positioning them in confrontation, Roussel is channeling his best friend Vuillard’s paintings of his mother and sister, which often hinted at a familial tension.

Although Roussel’s murals and large-scale decorative paintings can be found in many major museums in Europe and Russia, works from his Nabi period are rare and unrepresented in American collections, making our acquisition of Public Park all the more significant. The first major work by Roussel to enter the Art Institute’s collection, its addition fills a gap in our holdings of Nabi paintings by his colleagues Vuillard, Denis, and Vallotton and allows us to forge new dialogues across our singular collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. You can find it on view now in Gallery 244.

—Gloria Groom, chair and Winton Green Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, and executive director of initiatives in France

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