Suffused with light and color, Pierre Bonnard’s Assiette de fruits is a casually intimate scene of the domestic everyday that carefully balances painterly convention with modernist experimentation (see fig. 1).

Throughout his career Bonnard demonstrated a deep attachment to the still-life, and while the present work certainly sits comfortably enough within this tradition, it nevertheless challenges certain generic preconceptions. Bonnard does not present us with an artificially arranged scene, as we might expect from Chardin, Manet or even Braque’s early still lives (see fig. 2), but instead recreates a photographic snapshot of everyday life that delights in the surrounding details of the domestic interior as much as the centrally positioned plate of fruits.

In this respect, Bonnard remained true to his Intimiste beginnings, capturing these fleeting visions of domesticity and recreating them in his studio from memory. Using quick sketches as reference points, Bonnard worked to recreate these transitory sensations: “to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden” (Bonnard quoted in Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lives and Interiors (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009, p. 11). Working from memory in this way also allowed the artist plenty of room for compositional experimentation and an intensification of the spatial relationships he observed between objects. Rather than careful life studies, these paintings record the stuff of life itself; the sometimes claustrophobic and visually cluttered space of these interiors are imbued with a heightened emotional charge energized through his radiant use of color.

By 1917, Bonnard had left the darker tones of his Nabis days firmly behind him and here we can see him in confident command of a luminous and transformative palette. Powerfully expressive, color in Bonnard’s still-lives radiates a very human heat, suffusing his interiors and the objects within them with a sense of the bodies that have just passed through them. The low perspective and sharp diagonal of the table in the present work illustrate Bonnard’s radical approach to spatial design and anticipate developments that would have an important influence on the interiors of later artists such as David Hockney or Richard Diebenkorn (see fig. 3).

Employing one of Bonnard’s favorite color strategies, the off-white ground of the tablecloth at once anchors and animates its own pattern rendered in a series of repeated dashes of intense blues and pinks. Dropping away drastically at the frontal edge of the table and out of the picture’s frame, the cloth draws the precariously balanced plate towards the picture surface, a visual effect emphasized by the contrast of whites, blues and blacks that pull the eye between the highlights of the plate and the strong crescent of its shadow.

In its flattened perspective, emphasis on pattern, and bold and simplified style, Assiette de Fruits draws an intimate connection to Bonnard’s earlier work, particularly the foundational influence of Japanese woodblock prints and the aesthetic agenda of Les Nabis group. The tightly organised surface here highlights how much further he pushed these principles, the sharp vertical of the table’s edge echoed in the doorway and furniture behind and contrasted against the full, volumetric forms of the fruit and the curve of the plate. Anticipating the all-over qualities of Abstract Expressionism while looking back to his more decorative paintings of the 1890s, the movement between looser brushstrokes and a more solid treatment of form amplifies the intense relationships between colors. In Assiette de fruits this has the effect of animating the entire surface of the canvas and signposting the direction that Bonnard would take in his pursuit of light, color and pattern in the years to follow (see fig. 4).