This picture stands somewhat apart in Vuillard's oeuvre: his interiors are usually much more cluttered with details, at times almost as if he had a phobia of empty space. The Children reveals another artist, the gourmet become aesthete, as Jacques Emile Blanche aptly put it. Here Vuillard boldly introduces blank spaces into the composition, making them a necessary condition for the stability of the entire construction, About a third of the whole painting is given over to the pale patch of the floor. Playing on the contrast of empty areas and bright ones with details intense in both tone and colour, Vuillard endows the painting with an internal significance. The painting was produced in Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, a village on the Brittany coast, to which Vuillard had been invited by Alfred Natanson. A piece of the Saint-Jacut landscape is visible beyond the balcony. The artist was on close terms with all three of the Natanson brothers, the sons of a rich banker who jointly founded La Revue Blanche, the best periodical of the 1890s.