Pierre Bonnard

Estate of the artist
Private Collection, United States

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Pierre Bonnard, 1966, no. 225

Jean Bouret, Bonnard, Séductions, Paris, 1967, illustrated in color on the title page
Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, vol. III, Paris, 1973, no. 1536, illustrated p. 419

The work is in excellent condition. The canvas has been lined. The colors are exceptionally bright and fresh. Under UV light: certain pigments fluoresce but no inpainting is apparent.
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Pommes dans un plat sur une nappe may be counted among the most exquisite and also the very last still lifes that Bonnard ever painted. This recurring motif was derived from the interior of his beloved house in Le Cannet, a small and charming town overlooking Cannes and the coastline of the Côte d’Azur, and yet this painting is far from a literal record of his household. Bonnard spent most of 1903 travelling between Trouville, London, Vernon and Deauville, and he longed for Le Cannet, his favorite place of retreat and future permanent home. He most likely painted this work while on the move—he always had his brushes, palettes and canvases at hand and insisted on adding further and further "final" touches to his works. Pommes dans un plat sur une nappe is presumed to represent Bonnard’s yearning for stability and permanence, associated with the simplicity of the familiar, including food set at the family table.

Unlike Bonnard’s earlier, often very decorative records of the everyday, the present work is striking for its relative austerity. The artist presents the viewer with an unexpectedly modest portrayal of a patterned Provenҫal fruit bowl juxtaposed with a shimmering blue-white cloth against a blended background. The overall fleeting appearance of the scene, comprised of vibrating, urgent brushstrokes, abandoned perspective and calculated lack of detail, gives some shape to the artist's impassioned technique. At the same time, this image is one of Bonnard’s most successful painterly representations of what he called "mobile vision." As the artist declared, he sought to "give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing" (Dita Amory, Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 71). Like the Symbolist poets before him, Bonnard firmly believed that "to name an object is to destroy three-quarters of the pleasure we take in it, which is derived from the enjoyment of guessing by degrees; of suggesting it" (Sarah Whitfield & John Elderfield, Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, pp. 12-13).

A playful exercise in self-introspection, Pommes dans un plat sur une nappe confirms Bonnard’s position among the greatest pioneers of modern still-life painting. Displaying parallels with the seventeenth-century grandfather of this genre, Jean-Siméon Chardin, this work also follows the path set out by Paul Cézanne (see fig. 1). Where Cézanne scientifically examines the spatial relations of the numerous objects depicted, Bonnard focuses on the ephemerality of first impressions. As the artist and writer Patrick Heron remarked, Bonnard "knows how to make a virtue of emptiness, how to keep a great expanse of picture surface intensely meaningful" (quoted in ibid., p. 32).