Description
This painting is from a nine-panel decorative suite showing children playing in two of Paris’s most spacious parks: the Tuileries Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne. It depicts a game of hide-and-seek in which a girl conceals herself behind a tree. The stillness of the women resting on green chairs at the right is countered by children running at the left. Rather than a naturalist rendering of the subject, Vuillard combined rich colors with large, reductive forms arranged in decorative patterns that flow across the picture surface.
Provenance
Alexandre Natanson [1867-1936], Paris (1894-1929); (Natanson sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 16, 1929, lot 122, sold to Georges Bénard) (1929); Georges Bénard, Paris (1929-1933); (Bénard sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 9, 1933, lot 90, sold to Henri Blum) (1933); Henri Blum, Paris (1933-); (César de Hauke, New York, sold to Knoedler & Co.) (Until 1953); (Knoedler & Co., New York, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) (1953); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1953-)
Accession Number
1953.212
Medium
distemper on fabric
Dimensions
Framed: 229.9 x 113 x 11.4 cm (90 1/2 x 44 1/2 x 4 1/2 in.); Unframed: 214.2 x 96.3 cm (84 5/16 x 37 15/16 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of the Hanna Fund
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) French Color: Brown Color: Gray
Background & Context
Background Story
Under the Trees, from the series The Public Gardens painted in 1894, is one of Vuillard most ambitious decorative compositions and a work that demonstrates his ability to create monumental art from the most ordinary subjects. The painting depicts figures in a public garden, their forms dissolving into the dappled light that filters through the trees above.
The Public Gardens series was Vuillard most ambitious decorative project, consisting of nine panels commissioned by Dr. Henri Vaquez for his Paris apartment. The series transformed the public garden - the democratic space of the Third Republic - into a decorative scheme of extraordinary sophistication, in which figures, trees, and paths are woven into a single fabric of patterned light.
The painting most radical feature is its dissolution of the figure into the landscape. The park-goers, rendered in the same broken brushwork as the trees and the paths, become elements in a decorative composition rather than its subjects. The dappled light, falling through the canopy of leaves, creates a visual field in which every surface - human, botanical, and architectural - is rendered in the same flickering technique, producing an effect of total assimilation: the figures are literally of the garden, inseparable from the environment that surrounds them.
Cultural Impact
Vuillard Public Gardens series demonstrated that decorative painting could address the public dimension of modern life with the same sophistication it brought to private interiors, influencing the mural tradition and the integration of art and architecture in the 20th century. The series is Vuillard testament to the public garden as the defining democratic space of the French Republic.
Why It Matters
Under the Trees captures the most radical quality of Vuillard art: the total integration of figure and environment. His park-goers, dissolved into a fabric of dappled light, are not individuals but elements - as much a part of the garden as the trees, the paths, and the sunlight that falls on everything equally.
