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Lot Essay
Bonnard painted the present work in 1924 at Le Cannet, a small village in the south of France near Cannes. The artist had been captivated by the intense light and saturated colors of the Côte d'Azur ever since the summer of 1909, which he spent at Saint-Tropez. He described this journey as "the revelation of a Thousand and One Nights" and recalled "the sea, the yellow walls, the reflections as full of color as the light" (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 119). For the next three decades, Bonnard divided his time between the north and south, spending the summer months at Vernonnet near Paris and the winters at Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Le Cannet, and Antibes. Nicholas Watkins has written, "For a realist from the north like Bonnard, southern light was a prerequisite for his emerging art of color" (ibid., p. 124). In 1926 Bonnard bought a house ("Le Bosquet") at Le Cannet, which became his permanent base in the south. By the end of his working days, his life and art had become completely intertwined there. He wrote to Matisse in 1941, "As for moving into a palatial hotel for a little material comfort, I would lose the basis of my existence, the constant contact with nature, my way of working" (quoted in Bonnard at Le Bosquet, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1994, p. 40).
Bonnard depicted the landscape around Le Cannet in more than two hundred canvases in the latter decades of his career. During his daily walks in the countryside, he made sketches of the terrain, often annotated with notes of weather conditions and lighting effects, which served as the point of departure for his paintings. In 1940, Bonnard reported to Vuillard, "I am very much interested in landscape, and my strolls are full of considerations in this regard. I am about to understand this land and no longer try to find what isn't there, since it conceals tremendous beauties. To establish the different conceptions to which nature gives birth from this perspective, that is what really interests me" (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p. 62). Watkins has described the process by which Bonnard mediated and transposed these observations of the landscape back in his studio: "Paintings begun in the memory of a visual experience encapsulated in a drawing were transformed through color into a rich, immensely varied surface made up of a tapestry of brushstrokes, glazes, scumbles, impasto, and highlights of pentimenti" (op. cit., p. 171).
Bonnard depicted the landscape around Le Cannet in more than two hundred canvases in the latter decades of his career. During his daily walks in the countryside, he made sketches of the terrain, often annotated with notes of weather conditions and lighting effects, which served as the point of departure for his paintings. In 1940, Bonnard reported to Vuillard, "I am very much interested in landscape, and my strolls are full of considerations in this regard. I am about to understand this land and no longer try to find what isn't there, since it conceals tremendous beauties. To establish the different conceptions to which nature gives birth from this perspective, that is what really interests me" (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p. 62). Watkins has described the process by which Bonnard mediated and transposed these observations of the landscape back in his studio: "Paintings begun in the memory of a visual experience encapsulated in a drawing were transformed through color into a rich, immensely varied surface made up of a tapestry of brushstrokes, glazes, scumbles, impasto, and highlights of pentimenti" (op. cit., p. 171).