The French artists who came along just after the Impressionists don't always receive as much attention, but they had their own attractive contributions to make to the handling of color, light and composition.

A compact exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, "Bonnard & Vuillard," showcases prints, paintings and drawings by artists whose careers straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and his friend, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), did not pursue atmospheric effects with the zeal of their Impressionist elders, but instead emphasized a very subjective approach to flat zones of color, highly selective lighting effects, and compositions relying on colorful patterning.

Vuillard's lithograph "Motherhood" (1896), for instance, puts what amounts to a spotlight on a seated mother and child who look very comfortable in a serenely dark and quiet domestic interior. The artist's interest in this maternal subject is complemented and perhaps surpassed by the varied patterns in the tablecloth, wallpaper and rug. Such patterns obviously help organize pictorial space and thus serve as a reminder that this is a formal composition.

Time and again these artists' concern with their human subjects is matched by a concern for how patterned lines make for a well-designed picture. In Bonnard's lithograph "The Pushcart" (around 1897), the red-faced, hunched-over vegetable vendor pushing a cart down a city street clearly is the center of attention, but this figure is nearly upstaged by the striped awning on a building in the background.

The parallel lines used to depict such an awning sometimes are deployed to put together an entire composition. Vuillard's lithograph "The Fireplace" (1899) relies upon parallel diagonal lines to show the harmonious compositional relationship between a hearth and a tall yellow chair that itself has a patterned seat.

These prints tend to be relatively spare with their parallel lines and other patterning, but sometimes the patterns run wild. In Vuillard's lithograph "Interior with Rose Wallpaper I" (1899), the wallpaper design is so colorfully assertive that we barely notice the items on a table or the woman standing next to it. Indeed, they're nearly swallowed up in an atmospheric room that's impressionistic in its own way.

Most of the prints are more restrained than "Interior with Rose Wallpaper I" when it comes to letting loose with color, but the exhibited paintings generally have a greater reliance on the vivid colors we're accustomed to in French art from this period.

Bonnard's oil painting "Breakfast in the Garden" (1916) features the artist's wife, Marthe, seated by a table. She's rather fuzzy in terms of the figuration. In fact, the artist seems more interested in a high-angle view down to the sharply defined, red-checkered tablecloth. Bonnard presumably likes his wife, but he really loves that tablecloth.

"Bonnard & Vuillard" remains through Aug. 10 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Call 443-573-1700 or go to www.artbma.org.

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