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Lot Essay
During the opening years of the 20th century, Bonnard painted a series of Parisian cityscapes near his apartment at 65, rue de Douai that portray with droll delight the countless vignettes and chance encounters that comprise the daily experience of the urban street, glimpsed in passing. In the present scene, two women in showy, oversized hats promenade along the sidewalk, drawing the attention of a slump-shouldered figure who has stopped to rest on a bench. At the far right, a small spotted dog scampers past, seemingly about to collide with a top-hatted man—the quintessential Parisian flâneur, a connoisseur of the boulevard—whose body is cropped by the edge of the canvas. “Bonnard set out to capture in his work what no other painter of his time had observed: the little incidents of Parisian life,” John Rewald wrote. “He descended into the streets and the squares, watching with equal interest people, horses, dogs, and trees. Broad avenues, busy street vendors, and cafés on sidewalks offered him their intricate patterns, their noisy agitation” (Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, pp. 25-26).
Rather than painting from a window looking down over the street, as Camille Pissarro had done in Paris and Rouen since the mid-1890s, Bonnard—an inveterate early-morning walker—here chose a street-level vantage point, positioning himself as an active participant in the bustle of the modern metropolis as well as an astute observer. The neighborhood where he lived and worked was an unpretentious, middle-class quarter at the foot of Montmartre, long frequented by artists and writers; Pablo Picasso lived a block away from May 1901 until January 1902, during his second stay in Paris, and painted the area as well. In the present view, Bonnard depicted a familiar stretch of shops along the boulevard de Clichy, the area’s main commercial concourse, near the spot where it intersected the rue de Douai; his own modest flat, located in a former convent, was less than fifty meters away.
The principal theme of the painting, however, is not the topography of the street itself but rather the human spectacle that it encompasses. Instead of plunging into depth like Gustave Caillebotte’s painted thoroughfares, for example, Bonnard’s boulevard de Clichy unfurls parallel to the picture plane, creating a frieze-like pictorial space—a shallow stage that the various actors in this informal modern-life drama traverse from side to side. The storefronts rise in the middle distance like a theatrical backdrop, blocking out all but a small corner of sky at the top left. The passage of shadow in the very foreground, with a decorative scalloped edge suggesting an awning above, marks out a distinct, sheltered spot for artist and viewer as they observe this quotidian pageant. “He placed the emphasis on people, not architecture,” Nicholas Watkins has written, “leisurely enjoying the spectacle of their comings and goings. Crowds drift by as in a dream or in a sequence for an early silent film” (Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 93).
This subtly radiant, quietly animated scene dates to an important juncture in Bonnard’s career, marked by a creative tension between his achievements in the Nabi style and his mounting interest in Impressionism. The opening of the Caillebotte bequest at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1897 had meant official state recognition for Impressionism, once disparaged and denounced for the challenge it posed to Salon norms. For Bonnard, however, who had still been a teenager when the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition took place in 1886, the Luxembourg installation was nothing short of revelatory, as were the ensuing Impressionist shows at Durand-Ruel. “I remember very well that at that time I knew nothing about Impressionism,” he later recounted, “and we admired Gauguin’s work for itself and not in its context. When we discovered Impressionism, it came as a new enthusiasm, a sense of revelation and liberation, because Gauguin is a classic, almost a traditionalist, and Impressionism brought us freedom” (ibid., p. 52).
By the turn of the century, Bonnard had adopted many of the hallmarks of Impressionism, including a white ground, the broken and visible brushstroke, and open-air subject matter. In the present painting, he has used a harmonious palette of muted golden tones, enlivened with patches of red, green, and charcoal gray, to evoke the urban milieu under delicate morning sun. In its calculated decorative structure, however, the canvas remains true to the anti-naturalist principles of his Nabi period. The various elements of the composition—the street, the lampposts, the slats of the bench, the rectangular shopfronts of varying size and tonality—are all carefully aligned within the dominant structure of a grid, with the windows of the buildings reading like tiny tesserae in an overall mosaic of color and light.
“When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists and try to take it further,” Bonnard explained, “we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of color. Art is not Nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of color as a means of expression” (ibid., p. 61).
Bonnard, moreover, eschewed the signal Impressionist practice of painting en plein air, instead translating his vision of the city onto canvas from memory in the intimacy of his studio, muffling details to create an atmospheric effect. “The Impressionists, in seizing one moment, thought to capture reality with it—but they were merely capturing its luminous skin,” Jean Clair has explained. “This was very different from Bonnard’s intention, which...consisted in letting himself be imbued with [the subject], only to revive it later on. Then, when the distillation of memory had retained only its finest and most lasting qualities, its light and its odor, it would shine again with all its brightness in the purer air of his memory, giving him the same feeling of bliss as came to Proust who, on stumbling over the uneven stones of the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, imagined himself transported to the Piazza San Marco” (Bonnard, The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 31).
Rather than painting from a window looking down over the street, as Camille Pissarro had done in Paris and Rouen since the mid-1890s, Bonnard—an inveterate early-morning walker—here chose a street-level vantage point, positioning himself as an active participant in the bustle of the modern metropolis as well as an astute observer. The neighborhood where he lived and worked was an unpretentious, middle-class quarter at the foot of Montmartre, long frequented by artists and writers; Pablo Picasso lived a block away from May 1901 until January 1902, during his second stay in Paris, and painted the area as well. In the present view, Bonnard depicted a familiar stretch of shops along the boulevard de Clichy, the area’s main commercial concourse, near the spot where it intersected the rue de Douai; his own modest flat, located in a former convent, was less than fifty meters away.
The principal theme of the painting, however, is not the topography of the street itself but rather the human spectacle that it encompasses. Instead of plunging into depth like Gustave Caillebotte’s painted thoroughfares, for example, Bonnard’s boulevard de Clichy unfurls parallel to the picture plane, creating a frieze-like pictorial space—a shallow stage that the various actors in this informal modern-life drama traverse from side to side. The storefronts rise in the middle distance like a theatrical backdrop, blocking out all but a small corner of sky at the top left. The passage of shadow in the very foreground, with a decorative scalloped edge suggesting an awning above, marks out a distinct, sheltered spot for artist and viewer as they observe this quotidian pageant. “He placed the emphasis on people, not architecture,” Nicholas Watkins has written, “leisurely enjoying the spectacle of their comings and goings. Crowds drift by as in a dream or in a sequence for an early silent film” (Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 93).
This subtly radiant, quietly animated scene dates to an important juncture in Bonnard’s career, marked by a creative tension between his achievements in the Nabi style and his mounting interest in Impressionism. The opening of the Caillebotte bequest at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1897 had meant official state recognition for Impressionism, once disparaged and denounced for the challenge it posed to Salon norms. For Bonnard, however, who had still been a teenager when the eighth and final Impressionist Exhibition took place in 1886, the Luxembourg installation was nothing short of revelatory, as were the ensuing Impressionist shows at Durand-Ruel. “I remember very well that at that time I knew nothing about Impressionism,” he later recounted, “and we admired Gauguin’s work for itself and not in its context. When we discovered Impressionism, it came as a new enthusiasm, a sense of revelation and liberation, because Gauguin is a classic, almost a traditionalist, and Impressionism brought us freedom” (ibid., p. 52).
By the turn of the century, Bonnard had adopted many of the hallmarks of Impressionism, including a white ground, the broken and visible brushstroke, and open-air subject matter. In the present painting, he has used a harmonious palette of muted golden tones, enlivened with patches of red, green, and charcoal gray, to evoke the urban milieu under delicate morning sun. In its calculated decorative structure, however, the canvas remains true to the anti-naturalist principles of his Nabi period. The various elements of the composition—the street, the lampposts, the slats of the bench, the rectangular shopfronts of varying size and tonality—are all carefully aligned within the dominant structure of a grid, with the windows of the buildings reading like tiny tesserae in an overall mosaic of color and light.
“When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists and try to take it further,” Bonnard explained, “we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of color. Art is not Nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of color as a means of expression” (ibid., p. 61).
Bonnard, moreover, eschewed the signal Impressionist practice of painting en plein air, instead translating his vision of the city onto canvas from memory in the intimacy of his studio, muffling details to create an atmospheric effect. “The Impressionists, in seizing one moment, thought to capture reality with it—but they were merely capturing its luminous skin,” Jean Clair has explained. “This was very different from Bonnard’s intention, which...consisted in letting himself be imbued with [the subject], only to revive it later on. Then, when the distillation of memory had retained only its finest and most lasting qualities, its light and its odor, it would shine again with all its brightness in the purer air of his memory, giving him the same feeling of bliss as came to Proust who, on stumbling over the uneven stones of the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, imagined himself transported to the Piazza San Marco” (Bonnard, The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 31).