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Lot Essay
Painted in 1927, La Seine à Vernon belongs to an important series of landscapes Pierre Bonnard had begun the previous year at his house at Le Vernonnet. A symphony of emerald greens and aquamarines, the picture depicts a glimpse of the Seine, viewed through rich and wild vegetation. Demonstrating his talent as a colourist, in La Seine à Vernon Bonnard combined creamier, denser brushstrokes with more atmospheric, sfumato effects, giving to the landscape a rich texture, which poetically conveys the shimmering colours of nature.
Pictures such as La Seine à Vernon express Bonnard’s fondness for the landscape that surrounded his house at Le Vernonnet. Tenderly renamed ‘Ma Roulotte’ – My Caravan – Bonnard’s abode was situated along the Seine, a few kilometres away from Giverny, where Claude Monet had settled years before. The two painters had become great friends, paying visits to each other, whenever Bonnard was at Le Vernonnet. Like Monet had done in Giverny, Bonnard would find great inspiration in the garden of his home and in the nature surrounding it. But unlike the Impressionist master, Bonnard never tried to mould nature into an arranged effect. On the contrary, he let the garden in front of his house develop into an expressive wilderness. In the artist’s biography, Thadée Natanson recalled: ‘The house (…) was located in the centre of the garden, where Bonnard greatly liked to hoe and even more dig, water, and do all kinds of gardening except restricting the growth of the plants and flowers’ (quoted in J. Zutter, ‘Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature’, pp. 37-73, in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, exh. cat., Canberra, 2003, p. 54).
Bonnard’s love for wild nature is exemplified in La Seine à Vernon, where the greenery of the river’s shore is celebrated in its anarchic beauty, foliage and trees merging into a kaleidoscopic range of hues. Yet, below this apparent spontaneity lies a carefully planned composition. In La Seine à Vernon, the scene is introduced by means of a traditional repoussoir: the trees on the left block part of the landscape, only to better introduce the view of the Seine in the background. There, Bonnard placed a bold streak of orange: depicting the river’s opposite shore, this strip of light enhances the blue of the river, emphasising the sense of depth in the picture.
Bonnard’s concern for striking the right composition in his landscapes is reflected in the fact that he preferred to work on loose canvases, often tacked to the wall, to better enlarge, reduce and crop his composition. Bonnard explained: ‘working within a set of imposed dimensions seems to me intolerable, as the composition is more or less always cropped or modified by material measurements of the support... This process is useful to me, especially for landscapes. In every landscape there is the need for a certain quantity of sky and land, water and greenery, a dosage of elements that one cannot always establish at the start…’ (Bonnard, quoted in A. Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard, Paris, 1967, p. 127). An example of the profusion of colouristic effects which characterised Bonnard’s painting, La Seine à Vernon illustrates the artist’s ambition to create balanced, subtle compositions which could express the inherent decorative potential of nature.
Pictures such as La Seine à Vernon express Bonnard’s fondness for the landscape that surrounded his house at Le Vernonnet. Tenderly renamed ‘Ma Roulotte’ – My Caravan – Bonnard’s abode was situated along the Seine, a few kilometres away from Giverny, where Claude Monet had settled years before. The two painters had become great friends, paying visits to each other, whenever Bonnard was at Le Vernonnet. Like Monet had done in Giverny, Bonnard would find great inspiration in the garden of his home and in the nature surrounding it. But unlike the Impressionist master, Bonnard never tried to mould nature into an arranged effect. On the contrary, he let the garden in front of his house develop into an expressive wilderness. In the artist’s biography, Thadée Natanson recalled: ‘The house (…) was located in the centre of the garden, where Bonnard greatly liked to hoe and even more dig, water, and do all kinds of gardening except restricting the growth of the plants and flowers’ (quoted in J. Zutter, ‘Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature’, pp. 37-73, in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, exh. cat., Canberra, 2003, p. 54).
Bonnard’s love for wild nature is exemplified in La Seine à Vernon, where the greenery of the river’s shore is celebrated in its anarchic beauty, foliage and trees merging into a kaleidoscopic range of hues. Yet, below this apparent spontaneity lies a carefully planned composition. In La Seine à Vernon, the scene is introduced by means of a traditional repoussoir: the trees on the left block part of the landscape, only to better introduce the view of the Seine in the background. There, Bonnard placed a bold streak of orange: depicting the river’s opposite shore, this strip of light enhances the blue of the river, emphasising the sense of depth in the picture.
Bonnard’s concern for striking the right composition in his landscapes is reflected in the fact that he preferred to work on loose canvases, often tacked to the wall, to better enlarge, reduce and crop his composition. Bonnard explained: ‘working within a set of imposed dimensions seems to me intolerable, as the composition is more or less always cropped or modified by material measurements of the support... This process is useful to me, especially for landscapes. In every landscape there is the need for a certain quantity of sky and land, water and greenery, a dosage of elements that one cannot always establish at the start…’ (Bonnard, quoted in A. Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard, Paris, 1967, p. 127). An example of the profusion of colouristic effects which characterised Bonnard’s painting, La Seine à Vernon illustrates the artist’s ambition to create balanced, subtle compositions which could express the inherent decorative potential of nature.