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	Edouard Vuillard France, 1868-1940 Bouleaux a l'Etang-la-Ville, 1892 Oil on canvas 7 1/2 x 10 in. The Aaron M. and Clara Weitzenhoffer Collection, 2000

During the late 1880s, a group of disaffected young art students in Paris formed a quasi-mystical brotherhood which they labeled the "Nabis" (Hebrew for "prophets") and which exhibited collectively through the next decade. The artists of this group, whose greatest exponents were Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, rejected the naturalism of their academic training. Instead, they embraced the revolutionary teachings of Gauguin after he had departed from Impressionism. Gauguin's "Synthetism," a branch of Postimpressionism, called for a synthesis of natural form and artistic feeling which emphasized the imagination. The Nabis’ paintings, usually small in scale (especially Vuillard's), concentrated on decorative qualities such as patterns, simplicity of design, and flat fields of vibrant color with bold contours–all features of the present work–which were inspired by Gauguin and Japanese prints.

In this painting, Vuillard has depicted a landscape in a manner similar to that of his interiors of the mid-1890s. Both have a spatial ambiguity created by the avoidance of indications of depth, and both focus on patterns and textures (of wallpaper, fabrics, and carpets in the interiors and of trees in the present work).