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Lot Essay
Painted around 1910, Fleurs et carafe is a captivating example of the subtlety and enveloping atmosphere of Pierre Bonnard’s interior scenes, which drew inspiration from the familiar locations and everyday objects that populated the artist’s immediate environment. Capturing a radically cropped view of a comfortably appointed room, the scene centers around a spray of delicate white and yellow flowers gathered in a plain white jug, their leaves spilling over its edge and onto the decorative tablecloth below. Bonnard relished the simple elegance of such informal garden bouquets, placed in vessels that would usually hold milk or water on the table during a weekend breakfast or casual luncheon. Through the slightest of visual cues, the artist suggests the pitcher has been set down momentarily on the edge of the table, soon to be moved to an alternative point in the room, perhaps beside the glass carafe of water on the side-table just visible in the background.
The simplicity of the bouquet stands out against the rich decorative style of the rest of the room, where everything, from the bright red hue of the walls, to the contrasting patterns and textures of the furniture, and the ornate detailing of the fabrics, is captured in intense strokes of color. In this way, Fleurs et carafe demonstrates the important shifts that were occurring in Bonnard’s art of this period, as he began to move away from the somber naturalism and muted palette that had characterized his paintings between 1900-1906, and instead embrace a richer color spectrum, enlivening his compositions with an increasingly complex interplay of resonant tones.
This dynamic approach to color reached a new pitch following Bonnard’s first trips to the South of France in 1909 and 1910, where he spent time on the Côte d’Azur with the artist Henri Manguin. Describing this experience, Bonnard later wrote “It struck me like the Thousand and One Nights, the sea, yellow walls, reflections as bright as lights…” (quoted in S.M. Newmand, Bonnard, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1984, p. 251). The intense, clear light and vibrant colors of the Midi would leave their mark on Bonnard’s palette, infusing his compositions with a distinct warmth and vitality that would be further enhanced by his encounters with the art of Henri Matisse. In Fleurs et carafe, this fascination with the nuances and vitality of different tones is most evident in Bonnard’s treatment of the white tablecloth decorated with a row of pink roses, which is filled with a dancing array of hues under the shifting light. The artist had once told his friends Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser that he had spent his entire life trying to understand the secret of white, how it transformed in different situations and spaces. Here, strokes of delicate peach and gold sit alongside soft lavender and hints of blue and green in the shadowy light of the tabletop, before turning into a completely different shade of creamy white as the material flows over the edge and catches the bright light streaming through an unseen window.
The simplicity of the bouquet stands out against the rich decorative style of the rest of the room, where everything, from the bright red hue of the walls, to the contrasting patterns and textures of the furniture, and the ornate detailing of the fabrics, is captured in intense strokes of color. In this way, Fleurs et carafe demonstrates the important shifts that were occurring in Bonnard’s art of this period, as he began to move away from the somber naturalism and muted palette that had characterized his paintings between 1900-1906, and instead embrace a richer color spectrum, enlivening his compositions with an increasingly complex interplay of resonant tones.
This dynamic approach to color reached a new pitch following Bonnard’s first trips to the South of France in 1909 and 1910, where he spent time on the Côte d’Azur with the artist Henri Manguin. Describing this experience, Bonnard later wrote “It struck me like the Thousand and One Nights, the sea, yellow walls, reflections as bright as lights…” (quoted in S.M. Newmand, Bonnard, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1984, p. 251). The intense, clear light and vibrant colors of the Midi would leave their mark on Bonnard’s palette, infusing his compositions with a distinct warmth and vitality that would be further enhanced by his encounters with the art of Henri Matisse. In Fleurs et carafe, this fascination with the nuances and vitality of different tones is most evident in Bonnard’s treatment of the white tablecloth decorated with a row of pink roses, which is filled with a dancing array of hues under the shifting light. The artist had once told his friends Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser that he had spent his entire life trying to understand the secret of white, how it transformed in different situations and spaces. Here, strokes of delicate peach and gold sit alongside soft lavender and hints of blue and green in the shadowy light of the tabletop, before turning into a completely different shade of creamy white as the material flows over the edge and catches the bright light streaming through an unseen window.