Le Lecture Sous Les Arbres A Amfreville (Reading Under the Trees in Amfreville)

Exhibited

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, Vuillard, 1953, no. 61.

Provenance

Mrs Nicolas, Paris, c. 1953

Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1 March 1982, lot 180.

JPL Fine Arts, London

Private collection, Mexico

Christie's, London, 16 November 1983, lot 131.

Private Collection

Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 4 June 2018, lot 252.

Literature

Antoine Salomon, Guy Cogeval, Edouard Vuillard, Mathias Chivot (2003) Vuillard: Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels, Paris: Skira and Wildenstein Institute, illustrated in colour on page 907.

Notes

Édouard Vuillard stands among the most distinctive voices of late 19th- and early 20th-century French painting. A central member of the Nabis, he developed a practice that merged the innovations of Impressionism with Symbolist subjectivity and decorative aesthetics. While his contemporaries often gravitated toward grand narratives or public spaces, Vuillard became best known as an Intimist, a painter of quiet domestic interiors and private gardens, where everyday moments were transformed into lyrical meditations on modern life.

This pastel, La Lecture sous les arbres à Amfreville (Reading Under the Trees in Amfreville), epitomises Vuillard’s ability to distil atmosphere and mood from seemingly modest subject matter. The scene presents a shaded garden, its trees rendered in flickering strokes of green, yellow and blue pastel, through which sunlight filters in broken patterns. At the far right, a figure, absorbed in his book, is almost subsumed by the surrounding foliage. True to Vuillard’s Intimist approach, narrative gives way to sensation: the viewer is drawn into the hushed stillness of a summer’s day, where leisure and contemplation exist in perfect harmony with nature.

Vuillard’s later landscapes often emerged from his time in Normandy, where he stayed with friends and patrons. In these works, the garden became a stage for exploring perception itself: how light, shadow, and atmosphere dissolve the boundary between figure and setting. His treatment of trees here recalls the decorative rhythms that had long fascinated him, from Japanese prints to patterned textiles, transforming natural growth into something almost ornamental.

Equally important to understanding this work is Vuillard’s role as a photographer, a practice he pursued with enthusiasm from the 1890s onwards. His photographs, often informal and intimate, reveal the same preoccupation with framing, cropping, and capturing fleeting instants that animate his paintings and pastels. In La Lecture sous les arbres à Amfreville, one senses this photographic eye: the tilted perspective, the partially cropped chairs in the foreground, and the dissolving figure suggest a moment caught unaware, as if observed through the lens. This dialogue between pastel and photography underscores Vuillard’s sensitivity to the ways in which modern vision itself was changing.

Pastel, a medium Vuillard employed with exceptional subtlety, heightens the work’s immediacy. Its powdery texture allows him to blur edges and soften contours so that colour and form seem to shimmer and dissolve. What results is a picture not of fixed detail but of perception in flux, where atmosphere takes precedence over linear clarity.

Seen within the broader trajectory of Vuillard’s career, La Lecture sous les arbres à Amfreville demonstrates how the artist extended the principles of Intimism beyond the walls of the bourgeois home into the open air. It is both a meditation on the relationship between people and their environments and an exploration of how modern vision, shaped by photography, by the decorative arts, and by the legacy of Impressionism, could transform the everyday into the poetic.

Belinda Thomson (1998) Vuillard, New York: Abbeville.

Katherine Kuenzli (2010) The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siècle, Oxfordshire: Routledge.