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Lot Essay
In Le petit déjeuner, Pierre Bonnard paints a luminous portrait of his longtime companion and most frequent subject, Marthe de Méligny (formerly known as Maria Boursin). Marthe is pictured seated at a dining table set for breakfast, in a room suffused with radiant morning light. She lifts a teacup to her lips, with a bountiful petit déjeuner spread before her: a plate piled high with apples, oranges, and grapes, a loaf of bread and a gleaming silver teapot. Below, a faithful, copper-colored dachshund faithfully attends his mistress. The scene is one of domestic pleasure, a peaceful moment of quiet, quotidian repose in the comfortable corner of a dining room—likely the artist’s own country home in Vernonnet, near Giverny.
Le petit déjeuner possesses all of the intensity of color that, by 1917, had become Bonnard’s signature. The warm glow of the morning sun has illuminated and colored the entire canvas. Yellow-orange light fills the windows behind Marthe, who is swathed in a poppy-red dressing gown. Her caramel-brown hair—which rhymes with the coat of the dog at her feet—has been cast in hues of scarlet and turquoise. The white linen tablecloth before her has been similarly transformed with iridescent strokes of lavender purple and cerulean blue. As Dita Amory has written of Bonnard’s work, “It was through color, not line, that pictures took hold in his imagination…Bonnard’s colors came to embody the emerging, meeting, and passing of forms in the transient world, whose components he turned into shapes and planes of saffron red, gold light, and violet shadows” (“The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings,” Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004, pp. 22-23).
Bonnard developed an early obsession with color through his affiliation with the Nabis, a group of avant-garde artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris. These young painters, who included amongst their ranks Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier, were specifically inspired by the examples of Post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The Nabis went even further than their predecessors in embracing the two-dimensionality of the canvas; collectively, they sought to reinvent modern French painting through radical color and forms. Though the group had dispersed by 1917, Bonnard continued to experiment with the possibilities of bold, bright pigmentation and richly patterned, decorative surfaces in his later work.
As Le petit déjeuner demonstrates, Bonnard was willing to distort three-dimensional shapes and space in order to stimulate visual interest. In the present work, for example, he provides a narrow glimpse into the dining room, his view partially occluded by the rainbow sherbet-colored doorframe that occupies the right margin of the canvas. The tablecloth, carpet and wall, though ostensibly occupying distinct vertical and horizontal planes, appear to merge. As observed by the art historian Timothy Hyman, “In the previously uncharted territory of peripheral vision, Bonnard discovered strange flattenings, wobbles, shifts of angle as well as of color, and darkenings of tone, penumbral adventures and metamorphoses which liberated him from visual convention” (Bonnard, London, 1998, pp. 160–161).
Despite the calm familiarity of the subject matter, the slightly off-kilter compositional arrangement of Le petit déjeuner creates the subtle suggestion of mutual alienation or emotional distance, and implies the artist’s own longing for intimacy. Sasha Newman has noted that this is a recurring theme in Bonnard’s later work, writing, “This dreaming feminine presence, Marthe, who so often appears in cut-off views—glimpsed on a balcony, through a door, or reflected in a mirror—is central to the underlying air of mystery, of hidden sadness in much of Bonnard’s art” (Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 146). For all of the cheerful bursts of color in Portrait de femme à table, Marthe’s undetailed face is largely in shadow, her expression inscrutable as a result. In many ways this is reminscent of some of Henri Matisse's richly patterned and detail-filled interiors, which feature sitters similarly lost in thought or gazing into the distance, such as the Philadelphia Museum's work of the same title.
This work was purchased by the famed modern art collectors Frances Lasker and Sidney F. Brody, whose renowned collection was filled with masterpieces by Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, in addition to Bonnard. The Brodys installed this remarkable assemblage of works in their iconic mid-century modern home in Los Angeles. They also lent the present canvas to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1970, before selling it in 1977. Le petit déjeuner now comes to auction after thirty-two years in the same private collection.
Le petit déjeuner possesses all of the intensity of color that, by 1917, had become Bonnard’s signature. The warm glow of the morning sun has illuminated and colored the entire canvas. Yellow-orange light fills the windows behind Marthe, who is swathed in a poppy-red dressing gown. Her caramel-brown hair—which rhymes with the coat of the dog at her feet—has been cast in hues of scarlet and turquoise. The white linen tablecloth before her has been similarly transformed with iridescent strokes of lavender purple and cerulean blue. As Dita Amory has written of Bonnard’s work, “It was through color, not line, that pictures took hold in his imagination…Bonnard’s colors came to embody the emerging, meeting, and passing of forms in the transient world, whose components he turned into shapes and planes of saffron red, gold light, and violet shadows” (“The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings,” Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004, pp. 22-23).
Bonnard developed an early obsession with color through his affiliation with the Nabis, a group of avant-garde artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris. These young painters, who included amongst their ranks Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier, were specifically inspired by the examples of Post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The Nabis went even further than their predecessors in embracing the two-dimensionality of the canvas; collectively, they sought to reinvent modern French painting through radical color and forms. Though the group had dispersed by 1917, Bonnard continued to experiment with the possibilities of bold, bright pigmentation and richly patterned, decorative surfaces in his later work.
As Le petit déjeuner demonstrates, Bonnard was willing to distort three-dimensional shapes and space in order to stimulate visual interest. In the present work, for example, he provides a narrow glimpse into the dining room, his view partially occluded by the rainbow sherbet-colored doorframe that occupies the right margin of the canvas. The tablecloth, carpet and wall, though ostensibly occupying distinct vertical and horizontal planes, appear to merge. As observed by the art historian Timothy Hyman, “In the previously uncharted territory of peripheral vision, Bonnard discovered strange flattenings, wobbles, shifts of angle as well as of color, and darkenings of tone, penumbral adventures and metamorphoses which liberated him from visual convention” (Bonnard, London, 1998, pp. 160–161).
Despite the calm familiarity of the subject matter, the slightly off-kilter compositional arrangement of Le petit déjeuner creates the subtle suggestion of mutual alienation or emotional distance, and implies the artist’s own longing for intimacy. Sasha Newman has noted that this is a recurring theme in Bonnard’s later work, writing, “This dreaming feminine presence, Marthe, who so often appears in cut-off views—glimpsed on a balcony, through a door, or reflected in a mirror—is central to the underlying air of mystery, of hidden sadness in much of Bonnard’s art” (Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 146). For all of the cheerful bursts of color in Portrait de femme à table, Marthe’s undetailed face is largely in shadow, her expression inscrutable as a result. In many ways this is reminscent of some of Henri Matisse's richly patterned and detail-filled interiors, which feature sitters similarly lost in thought or gazing into the distance, such as the Philadelphia Museum's work of the same title.
This work was purchased by the famed modern art collectors Frances Lasker and Sidney F. Brody, whose renowned collection was filled with masterpieces by Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, in addition to Bonnard. The Brodys installed this remarkable assemblage of works in their iconic mid-century modern home in Los Angeles. They also lent the present canvas to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1970, before selling it in 1977. Le petit déjeuner now comes to auction after thirty-two years in the same private collection.