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Lot Essay
Painted in 1887, Les courses à Longchamp is an important triptych dating from Pierre Bonnard's celebrated Nabi period. Bonnard has used the triptych device in order to show three different scenes from Longchamp, each with a different perspective, be it the focus on the horses and riders, on some of the glamorous bystanders or on the crowd of spectators. By presenting three panels with such different senses of perspective, Bonnard emphasises the autonomy of each one. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the three allows him to explore and celebrate three different facets of the races. And crucially, it allows him to celebrate one of the great constant sources of fascination in his work, which he had come to love as a child: nature.
In a sense, Les courses à Longchamp shows Bonnard adding a Nabi twist to the legacy of Edgar Degas. The theme of the races was one that was greatly associated with Degas and his Impressionist paintings; here, Bonnard has managed to adopt Degas' carefully-constructed sense of spontaneity but has augmented it with an intimisme that harks back to his membership of the Nabis, as does the accumulation of paint and forms in some of the panels. Indeed, in the middle panel, the forms appear to tumble up the composition with deliberately little attention paid to the illusion of three-dimensional space or perspective, in keeping with the tenets of the Nabis; by contrast, in the right-hand panel, Bonnard balances the Nabi treatment of the picture surface as a flat plane with the emphatic diagonal hinting at the scene stretching into the distance.
It was now, in the mid to late 1890s, that some of the Nabis began to appreciate the legacy of the Impressionists. Previously, they had been the prophets of the teachings of Paul Gauguin, as 'revealed' to them by their founder Paul Sérusier. Now, Bonnard managed to reconcile the ideas of the Nabis with a greater, more Impressionistic sensitivity to colour. 'When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists and try to take it further, we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of colour,' Bonnard explained. 'Art is not Nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of colour as a means of expression' (Bonnard, quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 61). The Nabis and the Impressionists shared the aim of capturing a fleeting instant in their pictures, while adding some notion of sensation, but the Nabis brought a new subjectivity and involvement to their works, something that Renoir recognised when he congratulated Bonnard on his illustrations for La Revue Blanche in the same year that this work was painted. The differing angles and compositions of the three panels in Les courses à Longchamp add to its atmosphere of spontaneity, allowing the pictures to resemble the photography that so interested Bonnard, heightening the triptych's sense of authenticity.
In a sense, Les courses à Longchamp shows Bonnard adding a Nabi twist to the legacy of Edgar Degas. The theme of the races was one that was greatly associated with Degas and his Impressionist paintings; here, Bonnard has managed to adopt Degas' carefully-constructed sense of spontaneity but has augmented it with an intimisme that harks back to his membership of the Nabis, as does the accumulation of paint and forms in some of the panels. Indeed, in the middle panel, the forms appear to tumble up the composition with deliberately little attention paid to the illusion of three-dimensional space or perspective, in keeping with the tenets of the Nabis; by contrast, in the right-hand panel, Bonnard balances the Nabi treatment of the picture surface as a flat plane with the emphatic diagonal hinting at the scene stretching into the distance.
It was now, in the mid to late 1890s, that some of the Nabis began to appreciate the legacy of the Impressionists. Previously, they had been the prophets of the teachings of Paul Gauguin, as 'revealed' to them by their founder Paul Sérusier. Now, Bonnard managed to reconcile the ideas of the Nabis with a greater, more Impressionistic sensitivity to colour. 'When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists and try to take it further, we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of colour,' Bonnard explained. 'Art is not Nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of colour as a means of expression' (Bonnard, quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 61). The Nabis and the Impressionists shared the aim of capturing a fleeting instant in their pictures, while adding some notion of sensation, but the Nabis brought a new subjectivity and involvement to their works, something that Renoir recognised when he congratulated Bonnard on his illustrations for La Revue Blanche in the same year that this work was painted. The differing angles and compositions of the three panels in Les courses à Longchamp add to its atmosphere of spontaneity, allowing the pictures to resemble the photography that so interested Bonnard, heightening the triptych's sense of authenticity.