Lot Essay
Pierre Bonnard painted La neige au Grand-Lemps while staying at his family's ancestral home, Le Clos (The Orchard), in Le Grand-Lemps, a village tucked away in the former province of Dauphiné at the base of the French Alps. Bonnard had spent school breaks at Le Clos as a child and young man, and was strongly attached to the estate which had originally belonged to his paternal grandfather Michel, a farmer and grain merchant. He continued to travel there with his family from the early years of his career until the house was sold in 1928, often staying for several weeks during the winter and spring and heading on long walks in the surrounding countryside. Bonnard preferred to paint from memory and the present work magically captures a quiet moment, perhaps at dusk, with a single figure trudging through the snow beneath a golden yellow sky.
Executed in 1910, La neige au Grand-Lemps bears witness to a crucial period of transition in Bonnard's oeuvre which arose from a tension between the Nabis’ style of the 1890s and his growing interest in the work of the Impressionists. By the turn of the century, Bonnard had come to adopt many of the hallmarks of Impressionism, including a white ground, broken and visible brushstroke, and open-air subject matter, characteristics that are all visible in the present work. Yet his striking legacy as a leading figure of the Nabis in combination with an increasingly Post-Impressionist outlook have a clear impact of the palette of works such as La neige au Grand-Lemps which display a particular concern for colour as a means of expression. As a keen traveller between Paris and the South of France, Bonnard’s surroundings were especially influential to the change in his pictorial compositions, and indicate the artist's sense of aesthetic freedom after the Nabis disbanded in 1900. Michel Terrasse, grandson of Bonnard’s brother-in-law Claude Terrasse who often stayed with the artist at Le Grand-Lemps, described the impact that these surroundings had on Bonnard and wrote, "A born colourist, he was sensitive not only to bursts of colour but equally to the quality of the air, to the vibration, the texture, the perfume of things" (M. Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, London, 1988, p. 11).
Executed in 1910, La neige au Grand-Lemps bears witness to a crucial period of transition in Bonnard's oeuvre which arose from a tension between the Nabis’ style of the 1890s and his growing interest in the work of the Impressionists. By the turn of the century, Bonnard had come to adopt many of the hallmarks of Impressionism, including a white ground, broken and visible brushstroke, and open-air subject matter, characteristics that are all visible in the present work. Yet his striking legacy as a leading figure of the Nabis in combination with an increasingly Post-Impressionist outlook have a clear impact of the palette of works such as La neige au Grand-Lemps which display a particular concern for colour as a means of expression. As a keen traveller between Paris and the South of France, Bonnard’s surroundings were especially influential to the change in his pictorial compositions, and indicate the artist's sense of aesthetic freedom after the Nabis disbanded in 1900. Michel Terrasse, grandson of Bonnard’s brother-in-law Claude Terrasse who often stayed with the artist at Le Grand-Lemps, described the impact that these surroundings had on Bonnard and wrote, "A born colourist, he was sensitive not only to bursts of colour but equally to the quality of the air, to the vibration, the texture, the perfume of things" (M. Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, London, 1988, p. 11).
