In A Game of Shuttlecock, also known as Gioco del volano, Racket Game on a Lawn from 1900, French painter Maurice Denis grants a huge scale to the subject of female leisure. Girls are garlanding flowers on the left, playing badminton on the right, and bathing in the background in a woodland setting.
Denis’ art has evolved back towards a type of realism in the faces without sacrificing his flair for the ornamental: for example the swings of the rackets rhyming with the curves and flailing of the boughs of the trees. This is a scene where all is in concord, with the social transplanted into the natural environment.
Maurice Denis’s A Game of Shuttlecock, or Gioco del volano, Racket Game on a Lawn is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France.
