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Trustees of Dartmouth College

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Born in a small town in eastern France, Edouard Vuillard moved with his family to Paris at the age of nine. Although he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, he gravitated toward the avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth century and ultimately became a member of the Nabis (Hebrew and Arabic for "prophet"), a group of artists who emphasized the decorative and symbolic functions of art. Best known for his intimate interior scenes often celebrating the life of bourgeois women, Vuillard also painted — from 1900 onward — a number of landscapes and marine subjects. Though on the surface contradictory, these subjects were united by the artist’s overall comfort with his surroundings, given that he selected his outdoor sites (like his indoor ones) for their associations with close friends and colleagues. He first exhibited his outdoor compositions in 1901 at the Salon des Indépendents, where they received critical recognition.

This suggestively abstract work depicts the beach at Vasouy, a small resort southwest from Honfleur on the Normandy coast. Beginning in the summer of 1901, Vuillard visited friends who rented a villa, La Terrasse, that boasted a view corresponding to the present composition. There is a small preparatory drawing for this work showing the same vantage point, with the ramp projecting into the sea. The artist often preferred such discreet locations, avoiding many of the busier sites that Claude Monet (1840–1926) had popularized in his art.

True to his subject, Vuillard abandoned his preferred technique of patterned brushstrokes for a broader, more fluid handling of paint, recapturing the style of impressionism. The bright palette heightens the idyllic atmosphere of a sun-drenched Normandy seacoast.

T. Barton Thurber