Square Berlioz

In 1915, in the second year of the war, Vuillard painted the small square below his flat on the rue de Calais in Paris. Its garden is named after the composer Hector Berlioz, who had died on that same street in 1869. The museum calls this a sketch, yet it is more than two metres wide, done in distemper, a glue-based paint, on paper that was later mounted on canvas. You look down across the railings and the heavy, dark trees to a tall apartment block, its front picked out in touches of yellow. The picture belonged to Jacques Salomon, the painter's nephew by marriage, who gave it to the national museums. In 1946 it was sent on deposit to the museum in Metz, in eastern France, and it stayed there until 2012, when it came to the Musée d'Orsay.