Winter Garden with Peacock

Vuillard was working on this canvas in the winter of 1939 and 1940, the first winter of the Second World War, and his death in June 1940 left it unfinished. You can see where he stopped. Bare trees fill the upper half, their branches drawn in quick dark lines against a grey sky touched with orange. A wall green with ivy runs across the garden, and the ground in front of it is still a loose field of brown marks. Dark birds sit high in the big tree, and the title promises a peacock. He used gouache and glue-based paint on a canvas more than two metres tall. His sister and brother-in-law passed on his spoken wish that his work should go to the national museums. From 1947 the picture spent 64 years on deposit at the museum in Amiens, returning to Paris in 2011.