L'Etang-la-Ville. The Station

By 1900 Vuillard had spent a decade painting the inside of Paris, dim rooms crowded with wallpaper and figures. This small panel catches him doing the opposite, out in the open air at L'Étang-la-Ville, a village west of the city on the edge of the Marly forest. He was there for the summer, staying with his sister Marie and her husband Ker-Xavier Roussel, a fellow painter who had settled in the village. What he chose to paint was the thing that made the place reachable at all: its little railway station. The line had come out here only in 1884, and it was that connection to Paris that let a family of city painters keep a house in a quiet country village and still slip back to town. Vuillard worked small and quick on board, holding the station and its low buildings in flat, muted patches of colour, the same eye he used on his interiors now turned on a stretch of open ground.