Lot 19
  • 19

Pierre Bonnard

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Description

  • Pierre Bonnard
  • INTERIEUR
  • Signed Bonnard (upper right)
  • Oil on canvas
  • 21 1/4 by 25 1/8 in. (54 by 63.9 cm)

Provenance

Baron Gourgaud

Jacques Dubourg, Paris

Jean Trêves, Paris

Paul Rosenberg, Paris

Dr. Fritz Nathan and Dr. Peter Nathan, Zürich

Private Collection, Germany

Private Collection

Exhibited

Hamburg, Kunstverein, Pierre Bonnard, 1970, no. 37

Literature

Dr. Fritz Nathan and Dr. Peter Nathan, 25 Jahre 1936-1961, Winterthur, 1961, illustrated p. 61

Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard Catalogue Raisonné de l'Oeuvre Peint, vol. II, Paris, 1968, no. 755, illustrated p. 304

Catalogue Note

By 1912 Bonnard was spending more of his time away from Paris, away from the distractions of being with other artists, away from the myriad distractions of city life. That year he bought a modest villa, "Ma Roulotte" ("My Gypsy Caravan") situated near Vernon, a town in the Seine Valley across the river from Giverny, where Monet lived. Over the next fourteen years it provided him with a vast storehouse of motifs. The bedroom of that house is the setting for this interior, as it is for several other paintings of the period, including Cabinet de Toilette of 1914 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In that painting, the artist positioned himself almost opposite the mirror and at a distance permitting a wider view of the open room and its contents. Here, in contrast, he moves closer, closing the space between the dressing table and the full-length mirror on the right. The resulting image is akin to a visual meditation on the color, light and extraordinary beauty of an ordinary domestic interior. Of critical importance is the image of his wife, Marthe, reflected in the mirror on the far wall. Bonnard's gaze seems to hover before coming to rest on the reflected figure of Marthe seated on the bed.

The informality of her pose is at one with the studied informality of the scene: clothes thrown over a chair, and a vase of wild flowers left standing on the floor as though just brought in from the garden. Many of the forms are soft and round, and left deliberately undefined. The way in which nothing in the room looks arranged is very typical of Bonnard, and that informality is further reflected in the paint handling. The brushstrokes are very light, and the paint applied in thin transparent washes so that the sense of an almost golden light moving around and within the space is carefully sustained.

The distance that separates two people is a constant theme in Bonnard’s painting, and one that he had begun to explore in 1898-99 with Homme et femme (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). That distance is often registered, as it is here, between the focused attention of the painter and the passive self-absorption of his companion. Oblivious to Bonnard’s gaze, Marthe continues to be engrossed in her toilette.

Her presence in the room, signaled by her reflection, is a device that distances her in time and space, and shifts her into another, almost miniature, scale. At the same time, it is a dislocation that makes her the focal point of the painting. As in so many of Bonnard’s interiors, the stillness and silence of an empty room is brought home to us by the suggestion of a human presence. Marthe’s small round figure in the mirror is much more than a reflection. It is the means by which the room is suffused with intimacy, translated into a space shared by two people.