Сад в Вокрессоне

Vuillard began this garden in 1920, in a leafy suburb west of Paris where his dealer Jos Hessel and his wife Lucy had just bought the house you can glimpse behind the greenery. He kept coming back to it. Over the next 16 years he reworked the canvas again and again, the final touches going on around 1936. He painted in distemper, pigment bound in warm glue, the matte medium used for stage scenery, which dries flat and chalky and let him rebuild an area without the shine of oil. Lucy Hessel was one of the great attachments of his life, and she is here, kneeling at the left, half-hidden by a rosebush while her cousin Marcelle stands talking at the right.