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Lot Essay
Beginning in the early 1890s, at the height of his association with the circle of young avant-garde painters who called themselves the Nabis, Bonnard produced a series of provocatively modern Parisian cityscapes that portray the countless vignettes and chance encounters that comprise the daily experience of the urban street. On his ritual walks in the city, he was constantly alert to the shock of an image—to unexpected incidents and fugitive sensations, glimpsed in passing, which sparked his impulse to begin a canvas. “It was in the metropolis,” Timothy Hyman has written, “that he first developed the faculty of passive attention, of waiting for that sudden welling-up of excited recognition, when a spatial arrangement locks perfectly into place, and a situation becomes an image” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 46). He then painted back in his studio, mediating this initial experience through the subjectivity of memory, “distilling emotion from the most modest acts of life,” he explained, “the theater of the everyday” (quoted in ibid., p. 50).
In Femme à l'aigrette, an elegantly dressed young woman wearing a plumed hat emerges from the Parisian night. A transitory encounter that likely took place in the Batignolles district at the foot of bohemian Montmartre, where the artist rented a succession of studios from 1889 onward.
Charles Baudelaire, in his Tableaux Parisiens, dedicates a poem to a passer-by:
Un éclair…puis la nuit ! – Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’eternité?
[A flash…then night! Fugitive beauty
Whose sight has made me suddenly reborn
Shall I never see you again except in eternity?]
By 1895, the year he painted Femme à l'aigrette, Bonnard had begun to distance himself from the more mystical and theoretical of his young colleagues, including Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, and to seek ways of reconciling the immediacy of direct experience with the highly decorative art form favored by the Nabis. The close cropping of the present scene, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints and the new technology of the Kodak snapshot, conveys all the freshness and informality of the first glance, while simultaneously reinforcing the underlying structure of the image.
Bonnard would later date the crystallization of his full painterly identity to this very moment, on the cusp of his first solo exhibition at Durand-Ruel. “The year was around 1895,” he recounted. “One day, the words and theories that were the foundation of our conversations—color, harmony, the relation between line and tone, balance—lost their abstract significance and became very concrete. I understood what I was seeking and how I would try to obtain it. What came after? The point of departure had been given to me; the rest was just daily life” (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 31).
In Femme à l'aigrette, an elegantly dressed young woman wearing a plumed hat emerges from the Parisian night. A transitory encounter that likely took place in the Batignolles district at the foot of bohemian Montmartre, where the artist rented a succession of studios from 1889 onward.
Charles Baudelaire, in his Tableaux Parisiens, dedicates a poem to a passer-by:
Un éclair…puis la nuit ! – Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’eternité?
[A flash…then night! Fugitive beauty
Whose sight has made me suddenly reborn
Shall I never see you again except in eternity?]
By 1895, the year he painted Femme à l'aigrette, Bonnard had begun to distance himself from the more mystical and theoretical of his young colleagues, including Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, and to seek ways of reconciling the immediacy of direct experience with the highly decorative art form favored by the Nabis. The close cropping of the present scene, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints and the new technology of the Kodak snapshot, conveys all the freshness and informality of the first glance, while simultaneously reinforcing the underlying structure of the image.
Bonnard would later date the crystallization of his full painterly identity to this very moment, on the cusp of his first solo exhibition at Durand-Ruel. “The year was around 1895,” he recounted. “One day, the words and theories that were the foundation of our conversations—color, harmony, the relation between line and tone, balance—lost their abstract significance and became very concrete. I understood what I was seeking and how I would try to obtain it. What came after? The point of departure had been given to me; the rest was just daily life” (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 31).