Pronounce the artist’s name: Vwee-yard’
The Promenade is one of nine decorative panels commissioned in 1893 by Alexandre Natanson, copublisher of La Revue Blanche, a Parisian intellectual journal. The panels adorned a room in Natanson’s Paris apartment which overlooked a park called the Bois du Boulogne.
Inspired by the location of the Natanson apartment, Vuillard chose scenes of daily life in Paris’s public parks as the theme for the panels. In this painting, three girls, one holding an infant, stand at the front of a wide path. They look toward two women who stand near a picket fence in the background. Trees and flowering bushes are in the background.
In creating this painting, Vuillard considered the decorative function of the panel. He flattened the space of the garden, careful not to paint it in deep perspective, which would have created a “window” in the wall. He added touches of color in the foliage, the patterns of the dresses, and the sun-dappled path to animate the painting surface. The colors are subtle and the matte surface recalls commercial wallpaper, which Vuillard admired and frequently depicted in other works. Vuillard’s decorative panels were not intended to overwhelm the viewer, but rather to provide a pleasant, harmonious background to daily life.
To achieve the flat, matte quality of this panel, Vuillard used distemper, a paint made by mixing powdered pigments with glue. This difficult medium was used to paint the broad, flat designs of theater sets, and Vuillard himself had extensive experience painting sets for contemporary theater productions.
Vuillard was born in 1868. When he was fifteen his father died, and the family lived solely on the income of Vuillard’s mother, a corset-maker. In his formative years, Vuillard was impressed by the works of the old masters in the Louvre Museum. In 1888, Vuillard attended the Académie Julian, where he became part of the Nabis. The Nabis emphasized two-dimensional design and pure colors, and were inspired by Japanese prints and the art of Paul Gauguin.
At the end of the 1890s, Vuillard was well known in Parisian art circles. His small, intimate paintings of interiors had been admired at exhibitions, resulting in a number of decorative commissions such as this one for Natanson. In addition, Vuillard designed theater sets, as well as covers and illustrations for avant-garde literary magazines.
