The Avenue

Édouard Jean Vuillard · printed 1899

Medium

Color lithograph with pastel and gouache on grayish-ivory China paper, pieced and secured with straight pins

Original size

32.5 × 42 cm (12 13/16 × 16 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

The Avenue carries the quiet shimmer of a Parisian street filtered through memory — dappled light, flattened forms, and a stillness that feels more felt than seen. Vuillard was a central figure in the Nabis, a group of Post-Impressionist painters who treated the picture plane as a surface of pure colour and pattern rather than a window onto the world. This lithograph belongs to his celebrated *Paysages et Intérieurs* portfolio of 1899, twelve prints commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard and widely regarded as among the finest colour lithographs of the era. Vuillard enriched this impression further with passages of pastel and gouache, giving the printed sheet a layered, tactile warmth that photographs consistently fail to convey. The portfolio was produced in a limited edition and brought Vuillard's intimate, decorative vision to a wider audience at a moment when printmaking in Paris was undergoing a genuine renaissance. A hand-painted oil reproduction translates the work into the medium Vuillard trained in, recovering the physical presence — the weight of pigment, the subtle shifts between matte and luminous passages — that the original's mixed-media surface was always reaching toward.