皮耶·博納爾

Estate of the artist

Private Collection, United States

Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Bonnard, 1966, no. 222 (as dating from 1935)

Oslo, Kunstnerforbundet, Pierre Bonnard, 1966, no. 31, illustrated in the catalogue

São Paulo, Museu de Art de São Paulo, Exposição Pierre Bonnard, 1972, no. 29, illustrated in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1935)

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Pierre Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, 1940-1947 et Supplément 1887-1939, Paris, no. 1617, illustrated p. 51

Good condition over all. The canvas is lined. Under UV, there are scattered spots of old retouching in the green apple and the fruit in the center, as well as touches in the black background surrounding the fruit.. The surface is stable and intact, and the composition is in good condition.
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This rich and vibrant still life of fruits on a table was painted during the war years whilst Bonnard was living at Le Bosquet, his small house in Le Cannet overlooking the Mediterranean. The domestic interior of this home, in particular the dining room and bathroom, provided the constructs for some of his finest interiors and still lifes. Bonnard kept a studio on the top floor of Le Bosquet where he painted solely from memory, capturing and interpreting the memory of objects and spaces on his canvases. Dita Amory, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discussed Bonnard’s approach noting “while that studio may have been where Bonnard kept his paints and brushes, where he tacked his canvases to the wall, and where he retreated from the world, it was not in the studio that he found his source of inspiration. That was left to the rooms of Le Bosquet, to the daily rituals of breakfast and tea, to the comfort of seeing Marthe feeding the cat. In the familiar, Bonnard discovered infinite possibilities.” (D. Amory, 'The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings' Pierre Bonnard. The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, New York, 2009)

Bonnard’s still lifes departed from tradition in that he painted the experience and memory of objects, the impressions left on his mind instead of trying to copy their actual physical appearance onto canvas. Nature morte, fruits bears a striking similarity to Cézanne’s Les pommes, painted a half century before, not only in subject matter and composition, but also in the manner which both artists imbue the still-life with all the subtlety and emotional potency of portraiture. Bonnard and Cézanne treated the background of their still life composition with as much attention and care as the objects themselves, creating dynamic and complex pictures. A blue and white striped tablecloth and red felt runner dominate the foreground of Nature morte, fruits, while a few blue objects rest on a table in the background. The round curves of the fruit are grounded by these horizontal lines, creating a sense of space and volume that gives the fruit a palpable presence. Clive Bell noted “The first thing one gets from a picture by Bonnard is a sense of perplexed, delicious color: tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there. From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative, but never vapid and never woolly. When we have realized that the pool of color is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height. And not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful overtone—that it is witty, whimsical, fantastic” (C. Bell, Since Cézanne, New York, 1922, p. 100).