The Transcendent World of Pierre Bonnard

The present work captures a quiet moment at the dining table, likely depicting Marthe, Bonnard’s lover and eventual wife, with her small dog. These quotidian, intimate moments were central to Bonnard’s artistic vision. The artist painted everyday scenes at his dining table repeatedly throughout his oeuvre, rendering Marthe, family members and friends sharing meals or tea. A contemporary critic Claude Roger-Marx noted in 1893 that the artist’s work: “catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallizes the most transient expressions” (Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 33).

Much has been written about the influence of photography on this aspect of Bonnard’s painting. The artist’s earliest experiments with photography date to the period of his involvement with the Nabis; this group of young artists were predictably intrigued by the new technology and began to use it as another means of capturing everyday life and as a counterpoint to their painterly investigations of the same subjects. The influence of the medium is particularly evident in Le Café where Marthe is caught mid-gesture while serving coffee, and Bonnard is attempting to capture a specific moment in time.

In Le Café, Bonnard’s early involvement with the Nabis becomes evident. He combines a loose, flattened application of paint with rich coloration to create an imaginative and subtle textural effect in the present work. The patterning of the chair, the texture of the porcelain, and the soft, billowing pink of Marthe’s shawl and dress are the result of Bonnard’s distinctive palette and careful juxtapositions of color. As John Rewald writes, "With the exception of Vuillard, no painter of his generation was to endow his technique with so much sensual delight, so much feeling for the indefinable texture of paint, so much vibration. His paintings are covered with color applied with a delicate voluptuousness that confers to the pigment a life of its own and treats every single stroke like a clear note of a symphony. At the same time Bonnard's colors changed from opaque to transparent and brilliant, and his perceptiveness seemed to grow as his brush found ever more expert and more subtle means to capture the richness both of his imagination and of nature" (Pierre Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, p. 48).