Pierre Bonnard

Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1905)
Fabri (acquired from the above)
Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the above on 27th February 1909)
Knoedler & Co., New York
Alexander Duncan, Scotland
Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London
Sir Keith Murdoch, Melbourne
Miss C. I. Black (sale: Sotheby & Co., London, 26th April 1967, lot 25)
Private Collection (purchased at the above sale; sale: Sotheby's, London, 29th November 1994, lot 42)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Bonnard, 1910, no. 2
Melbourne, Melbourne Herald Exhibition, 1939

Gustave Coquiot, Bonnard, Paris, 1922, p. 47, mentioned
Charles Terrasse, "Maisons de campagne de Bonnard", in Formes et couleurs, vol. 6, no. 2, Lausanne, 1944, p. 33, illustrated (titled La Maison familiale dans l'Isère)
Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, 1888-1905, Paris, 1965, vol. I, p. 298, no. 330, illustrated
The Burlington Magazine, London, April 1967, p. XXIII, illustrated

La Partie de balle depicts two children playing in front of Le Clos, the Bonnards’ family house at Le Grand-Lemps. Bonnard was strongly attached to Le Clos, and spent many summers there, painting scenes of bourgeois country life, and recording his family at leisure in both paintings and photographs. He visited the house often during his childhood years, and it was at Le Clos that Bonnard painted his first canvases. Later, in the early 1900s, he often found the house animated by young children. The artist’s sister had married the composer Charles Terrasse in 1890, and it is probably her children, Bonnard’s niece and nephew, that are depicted playing in the present work.

As Jörg Zutter has observed: "Bonnard spent holidays at his parents’ house, Le Clos, at Le Grand-Lemps in the Dauphiné. Many of his interiors and landscapes are infused with the light and lushness of this rural region between Lyons and Grenoble. He was much attached to the house and his stays there were always artistically productive. […] Many paintings and photographs from about 1900 record Bonnard’s family life directly, showing family gatherings or groups of children playing games or bathing in the pool on the large garden. It was also at Le Grand-Lemps that Bonnard developed the ideas for his first large decorative landscapes" (J. Zutter, Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p. 43).