Public Gardens

In 1894 Alexandre Natanson, one of the three brothers who ran La Revue blanche, an avant-garde Paris magazine, asked Vuillard to decorate a large room in his house. He received nine tall panels of Paris parks, children at play and the women keeping an eye on them. Nannies and small children fill the first of these three, women sit talking in the middle, one under a pale parasol, and in the last a woman in black sits alone beneath a red one. The paint is distemper, pigment bound with warm glue, which dries flat and chalky. The set stayed in the house until Natanson's sale in 1929, when the French state bought this group, and others from the series now belong to museums in Brussels, Houston and Cleveland. Vuillard went back to one panel of this group and reworked it in 1936.