
Under the Trees (from "The Public Gardens")
1894
This painting is from a nine-panel decorative series showing children playing in two of Paris’s most spacious parks: the Tuileries Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne. It depicts a game of hide-and-seek in which a girl conceals herself behind a tree. The stillness of the women resting on green chairs at the right is countered by children running at the left. Rather than a realistic rendering of the subject, Édouard Vuillard arranged the composition in bands of colorful, decorative patterns so that the painting seems like a tapestry.
- Medium
- distemper on fabric
- Location
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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Pierre Bonnard
French · b. 1867

Bonnard, like Vuillard, was a core Nabis artist who transformed everyday scenes of bourgeois leisure into flattened, pattern-driven compositions with bold decorative color bands, often depicting figures in gardens and parks with a similar sense of intimate stillness and movement.

Maurice Denis
French · b. 1870

Denis shared Vuillard's Nabis philosophy of treating the picture surface as an arrangement of flat, rhythmic shapes and colors, frequently painting women and children in outdoor settings where decorative patterning supersedes strict naturalistic representation.

Félix Vallotton
Swiss · b. 1865

Vallotton created similarly compressed, pattern-laden park and garden scenes featuring children at play alongside resting figures, using flattened forms and strong color contrasts that echo the decorative banding and quiet narrative tension found in this Vuillard panel.

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