Pierre Bonnard

Estate of the artist
Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., New York (acquired by 1965)
Acquired from the above in 1967 

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint 1920-1939, vol. II, Paris, 1973, no. 700, illustrated p. 264

The canvas is lined. The surface is clean and pigments are fresh. Tiny pindots of loss at center right edge. Under UV light: some original pigments fluoresce. There are a few strokes of inpainting around branch at center of composition. Some faint fluoresce in the sky is indicative of artist's pentimenti but does not appear to be inpainting. This work is in good condition.
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Jardin au bord de la Seine, painted circa 1912, is an exemplary work which demonstrates Bonnard's delight in depicting domestic landscapes. This richly hued canvas depicts the corner of his garden at Vernonnet overlooking a serene horizon which the artist has entirely saturated with dense color. In the summer of 1912 Bonnard and his model (and future wife) Marthe visited Grasse in the South of France before purchasing a house in the hamlet of Vernonnet called "Ma Roulotte," where they lived until the late 1920s. Vernonnet is situated only a couple of miles west of Giverny, where his close friend Monet lived and worked for nearly thirty years. Bonnard's garden scenes employ a typically Post-Impressionist rejection of traditional perspective, but unlike his neighbor Monet, he never resorted to pure abstraction. Jean-Louis Prat notes: "Bonnard always developed his own visual language, firmly rooted in reality. He did not, like Monet, virtually do away with the subject itself. He always used forms, without experimenting with abstraction, or even contemplating it" (Jean-Louis Prat, "Pierre Bonnard or An Enduring Painter," Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 1999, p. 19). Bonnard's pictures—composed of stylized forms and displaying a flattened perspective—captured views of untrammeled wild flowers, exotic foliage and trees against clear skies and evoking an identifiable sense of Edenic exuberance.

The present work marks the beginning of the final stage in Bonnard's development as a painter. Throughout the following three decades the artist concentrated on depicting his immediate surroundings in a purely tonal fashion. The artist wrote: "Color alone will suffice to express all one wants to say... there is no need for highlighting or modelling in painting. It seemed possible for me to reproduce light, shape and character by the use of color alone, without the help of any values" (quoted in Antoine Terrasse, "Some Thoughts on Pierre Bonnard," Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Salis, Salzburg, 1991, n.p.). Furthermore, Bonnard stated in 1935: "I have become a painter of landscapes, not because I have painted landscapes—I have done only a few—but because I have acquired the soul of a landscape painter insofar as I have been able to free myself of everything picturesque, aesthetical or any other convention that has been poisoning me"' (quoted in ibid., n.p.).