138

  • Figures in a Garden

  • ca. 1894
  • Édouard Vuillard (French 1868-1940)
  • Oil on composition board, possible study for Public Gardens series, 1894
  • 22.7 x 34.8 cm., 9 x 13-13/16"
  • Lent Courtesy of Private Collection through Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts

Essay by Matthew Bowman, Class of 2012

Figures in a Garden exhibits édourard Vuillard's Japonisme or use of Japanese artistic techniques. This includes flattened perspective, off-centered arrangement, color without shadow and the use of caricature to simplify the features of children. Vuillard witnessed the exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890. The publication of L'Art Japonais (1883) by Louis Gonse and Le Japon artistique (1888-1891) by Siegfried Bing also must have opened up the young artist's eyes to the world of Japanese aesthetics. His fascination with Japanese style can be traced back to his journals; one volume is full of ink drawings done with Japanesque techniques-"articulated outlines and dramatic sweeps of the brush" (Easton 46).

Vuillard owned a copy of the Manga by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. He may have used its figural sketches and facial models as inspiration. In Japanese art, the simplification of form achieved through caricature is a "powerful vehicle of emotion" (Ives 100). Hokusai humorously showed people on the move, exploring their changing awkward poses (Perucci-Petri 126). While the children in this painting are not moving, they are depicted with mere basic detail. Vuillard preferred not to show their distinguishing features. It is almost as if the individual bodies were of no importance, but rather they join together with the background trees and shrubs to form one single surface texture. The mixing of patterns in the Japanese manner is referred to as "pattern ground technique" and it aims to devalue the individual figure (Wichmann 211-212). Essentially, Vuillard crafted the children as pure decorative motifs.

The park in which they play was not one specific place. Vuillard chose an "amalgam of several public gardens" near his home in Paris. He meant for the park to be a cultural oasis within the increasingly urbanized Parisian environment (Groom 50-51). With that said, this could be a study for his series of Public Gardens done in 1894. The Parisian bourgeois ideal was that children be controlled by perpetual parental surveillance, but Vuillard ignored that model here. There appears to be a parent or guardian present, but she is not stifling the children's play in the park. On the contrary, she is allowing them time to engage in recreation.