Pierre Bonnard

Estate of the artist (inv. no. 678)
Charles Terrasse, Paris
Wildenstein & Co., New York
Sale: Christie's London, 30th June 1987, lot 173
Private Collection, France (purchased at the above sale)
Private Collection, Switzerland

Jean & Henri Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue Raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Paris, 1973, vol. III, no. 1290, illustrated p. 239

The canvas is lined. UV examination reveals retouchings along parts of all four edges.There is some extremely minor localised craquelure to the lower right edge. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition. Colours: Overall lighter and brighter in the original when compared to the printed catalogue.
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Personnages sous un arbre exemplifies the daring use of colour and distinctive compositional devices that earned Bonnard his name of ‘Japanese Nabis’. Having visited an exhibition of Japanese Art at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, Bonnard was inspired to crop the compositions of his paintings, as if they were photographic negatives in the studio. Indeed photography was another passion of the artist, who purchased one of the first kodak cameras in the 1890s. In the present work, the expanse of foliage to the upper right and slither of wall towards the centre and lower right force the viewer’s eye to settle on the expanse of blue paint that intimately surrounds the eponymous figure. Such a radical compositional arrangement would have been inconceivable to an academically trained painter and it was the influence of the mass produced Japanese wood block print that enabled Bonnard to make this stylistic leap: ‘It was through the contact with these popular images that I realized that color could express anything, with no need for relief or modelling. It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values’ (Bonnard quoted in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Pierre Bonnard, Early and Late (exhibition catalogue), Washington, D. C., 2002, p. 202).

As a central figure of the Nabis group, Bonnard had developed a distinctive use of colour, influenced by the flat areas of block colour with strong outlines as applied by Gauguin. The striking blues and yellows of the present work and the tree depicted solely in green are testament to this influence, but here we are also able to glimpse the influence of the Impressionists in the thick, individual brush marks and juxtapositions of pure colour. Bonnard describes the motives behind this process: 'When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists, and to attempt to take it further, we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of colour. Art is not Nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of colour as a means of expression’ (quoted in Timothy Hyman, Bonnard, London, 1988, p. 65). Bonnard’s later oeuvre, of which Personnages sous un arbre is an excellent example, was extremely well received, with Gaston and Josse Bernheim representing him as dealers from 1906 and Paul Signac exclaiming after an exhibition at their gallery in 1933: 'Prodigious. The unexpectedness, the rarity, the novelty. I assure you, my dear Bonnard, that not since 1880 when I "discovered" Claude Monet, have I experienced such a strong artistic emotion. [...] What a lesson, what encouragement' (quoted in Bonnard at Le Bosquet (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London & Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, 1994, p, 12).