Under the Trees (from "The Public Gardens")

This painting is from a nine-panel decorative suite 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 naturalist rendering of the subject, Vuillard combined rich colors with large, reductive forms arranged in decorative patterns that flow across the picture surface.