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Lot Essay
One of the Nabis' major ambitions was to subvert the academic hierarchy separating the fine arts from the decorative arts. Beginning in the 1890s, Bonnard, a prime mover in this campaign, aspired to remove the division between art and everyday life through the production of functional decorative objects including fans, screens, furniture and engravings as well as painting and sculpture. As they entered the twentieth century, the individual style of the core members if the Nabis movement--Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard--continued to evolve along distinct and independent lines, and each reached their full artistic maturity. Bonnard favored the softer, looser brushwork of the Impressionists over the linear definition espoused by Denis, to create complex and coloristically dazzling landscapes and scenes of domesticity.
The two present panels, "known collectively as In the Country, are unique to Bonnard's decorative career because of their small scale and their overt references to eighteenth-century pastorals... These narrow, vertical panels, depicting a mother and son and a father and daughter relaxing in a bucolic landscape, signal Bonnard's fascination not only with Arcadian and pastoral subjects, but also his interest in borrowing and updating art-historical themes and styles... Their suggestion of a pastoral past is tempered by Bonnard's inclusion of references to modern life, such as the contemporary dress of the figures" (op. cit., exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 179).
The present works were first owned by Henri Kapferer, an aerodynamics expert and inventor, who almost certainly commissioned the works from the artist. It is likely the panels' light-hearted and airy Rococo-quality that appealed to Kapferer, who installed the works on either side of a fireplace in his home in Paris at 8, rue Pomereau, where they served as decorative complements to a larger painting by Bonnard entitled Enfants sages (Dauberville, vol. II, no. 396).
The two present panels, "known collectively as In the Country, are unique to Bonnard's decorative career because of their small scale and their overt references to eighteenth-century pastorals... These narrow, vertical panels, depicting a mother and son and a father and daughter relaxing in a bucolic landscape, signal Bonnard's fascination not only with Arcadian and pastoral subjects, but also his interest in borrowing and updating art-historical themes and styles... Their suggestion of a pastoral past is tempered by Bonnard's inclusion of references to modern life, such as the contemporary dress of the figures" (op. cit., exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 179).
The present works were first owned by Henri Kapferer, an aerodynamics expert and inventor, who almost certainly commissioned the works from the artist. It is likely the panels' light-hearted and airy Rococo-quality that appealed to Kapferer, who installed the works on either side of a fireplace in his home in Paris at 8, rue Pomereau, where they served as decorative complements to a larger painting by Bonnard entitled Enfants sages (Dauberville, vol. II, no. 396).