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Lot Essay
“I have all my subjects at hand. I go visit them. I take notes. And before I start to paint, I meditate, daydream,” Bonnard once stated. “It is the things close at hand that give an idea of the universe as the human eye sees it...” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2009, pp. 61 and 122).
True to his word, Bonnard drew his most profound and enduring creative inspiration from the hushed and modest spaces of Le Bosquet, his long-time home in the south of France, overlooking the bay of Cannes. In the spacious dining room on the ground floor, the intimate sitting area upstairs, or the glittering jewel-chamber of a bathroom where his wife Marthe lingered in the tub, Bonnard made notes in his journal of color patterns or fleeting observations that sparked his impulse to begin a picture. He then painted from memory back in his studio, on lengths of canvas tacked directly to the wall, transforming his initial visual experiences into variegated tapestries of brilliant color. “The principal subject is the surface,” he maintained, “which has its laws over and above those of objects. It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting” (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 171).
Bonnard painted the present still-life in 1928, the year after he and Marthe moved to Le Bosquet; Bernheim-Jeune acquired the canvas within months of its creation and subsequently sold it to Georges Renand, then co-owner of the iconic Parisian department store La Samaritaine. The painting depicts a sensuous bounty of ripe Mediterranean fruits, the spherical forms piled high in a shallow wicker basket, one of Bonnard’s favorite still-life props; two chairs with woven rush seats, recognizable from photographs of the artist’s dining room, are visible in the background. “On the dining room table stood baskets with tall handles of plaited osier or raffia,” recalled Bonnard’s grand-nephew Michel Terrasse, a frequent visitor to Le Bosquet, “somewhere to put the peonies and mimosa, the oranges, lemons, and persimmons gathered, with the figs, from the garden” (op. cit., 1988, p. 14).
Departing from the Impressionists’ deftly rendered succession of fleeting moments, Bonnard has imbued these familiar and unassuming still-life objects, the stuff of his everyday life, with an unexpected air of enchantment–un arrêt du temps (“a stilling of time”), he called it. Light enters the room from an unseen window at the left and suffuses the fruit, lending a velvety radiance to peaches and pears alike. The white tablecloth acts as a staging ground for a full spectrum of other colors, from fiery gold to deep magenta and teal. In the background, the white wall beneath the chair rail has become an ocean of cool tones, while the upper portion–in reality painted Naples yellow–is like a blazing orange sunset. “Bonnard’s colors came to embody the emerging, meeting, and passing of forms in the transient world,” Dita Amory has written, “His Mediterranean palette and dazzling light added further abstraction to a corpus of paintings that became less obviously descriptive and more metaphoric over time” (exh. cat., op. cit., 2009, pp. 22-23).
True to his word, Bonnard drew his most profound and enduring creative inspiration from the hushed and modest spaces of Le Bosquet, his long-time home in the south of France, overlooking the bay of Cannes. In the spacious dining room on the ground floor, the intimate sitting area upstairs, or the glittering jewel-chamber of a bathroom where his wife Marthe lingered in the tub, Bonnard made notes in his journal of color patterns or fleeting observations that sparked his impulse to begin a picture. He then painted from memory back in his studio, on lengths of canvas tacked directly to the wall, transforming his initial visual experiences into variegated tapestries of brilliant color. “The principal subject is the surface,” he maintained, “which has its laws over and above those of objects. It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting” (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 171).
Bonnard painted the present still-life in 1928, the year after he and Marthe moved to Le Bosquet; Bernheim-Jeune acquired the canvas within months of its creation and subsequently sold it to Georges Renand, then co-owner of the iconic Parisian department store La Samaritaine. The painting depicts a sensuous bounty of ripe Mediterranean fruits, the spherical forms piled high in a shallow wicker basket, one of Bonnard’s favorite still-life props; two chairs with woven rush seats, recognizable from photographs of the artist’s dining room, are visible in the background. “On the dining room table stood baskets with tall handles of plaited osier or raffia,” recalled Bonnard’s grand-nephew Michel Terrasse, a frequent visitor to Le Bosquet, “somewhere to put the peonies and mimosa, the oranges, lemons, and persimmons gathered, with the figs, from the garden” (op. cit., 1988, p. 14).
Departing from the Impressionists’ deftly rendered succession of fleeting moments, Bonnard has imbued these familiar and unassuming still-life objects, the stuff of his everyday life, with an unexpected air of enchantment–un arrêt du temps (“a stilling of time”), he called it. Light enters the room from an unseen window at the left and suffuses the fruit, lending a velvety radiance to peaches and pears alike. The white tablecloth acts as a staging ground for a full spectrum of other colors, from fiery gold to deep magenta and teal. In the background, the white wall beneath the chair rail has become an ocean of cool tones, while the upper portion–in reality painted Naples yellow–is like a blazing orange sunset. “Bonnard’s colors came to embody the emerging, meeting, and passing of forms in the transient world,” Dita Amory has written, “His Mediterranean palette and dazzling light added further abstraction to a corpus of paintings that became less obviously descriptive and more metaphoric over time” (exh. cat., op. cit., 2009, pp. 22-23).