Pierre Bonnard

Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Georges Bernheim, Paris (acquired from the above and sold: Galerie Charpentier, Paris, June 7, 1935, lot 26)

M. H. G. Turitz, Goteborg (acquired in 1939 and until 1947)

Private Collection, Sweden (acquired by 1949)

Galerie O'Hana, London

Max Kaganovitch, Paris 

Acquired from the above in 1960

Stockholm, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Bonnard I svensk ägo, 1947, no. 18, illustrated in the catalogue 

Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Cézanne till Picasso, 1954, no. 20

La Gazette de l'Hótel Drouot, May 21-June 8, 1935

Konstrevy, XVe année, 1939, illustrated p. 42

François-Joachim Beer, Bonnard, Marseille, 1947, no. 89, illustrated p. 109 (titled Le Thé sur la terrasse)

Rolf Söderberg, Pierre Bonnard, Stockholm, 1949, illustrated p. 54

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, 1906-1919, Paris, 1968, vol. II, no. 909, illustrated p. 414

Although one of the titles for the work – Le Thé sur la terrasse après midi d’été (Maison de Misia Sert) – suggests that the setting might have been the country house that Misia Sert owned in Valvins, near Fontainebleau, it can in fact clearly be identified as the terrace of Bonnard’s villa Ma Roulotte in Vernonnet. It is possible that the couple in the background are Misia and her husband Thadée Natanson – the male figure in particular bears a more than passing resemblance to Natanson. They were close friends of Bonnard and frequent visitors to his house; they appear in a number of his paintings and if they are the couple in the present work it might explain the historic confusion regarding the location of the setting.

The terrace at Ma Roulotte is among the most iconic subjects of Bonnard’s oeuvre and one he returned to on numerous occasions, depicting it in many different guises but always using it as a starting point from which to explore his unique pictorial vision. The view in the present work is one of deliberate remove; Bonnard places himself outside the main center of activity on the terrace. As in much of the artist’s best work, the figures, and indeed most of the objects, are placed on the periphery of the pictorial plane. There is no one focal point; the different elements of the composition are given equal weight, so that the viewer must perceive them simultaneously. In this Bonnard sought to transcribe not so much the view before him, but rather the actual experience of seeing it. As the art historian Jean Clair wrote: “the revolution in painting brought about by Bonnard was that, for the first time, a painter attempted to translate onto canvas the data of a vision that is physiologically ‘real’ … He was the first artist to have attempted to portray on canvas the integrality of the field of vision and so bring nearer to the eye what classical perspective had kept at a distance” (quoted in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 33).