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Impressionist & Modern Art
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3226* PIERRE BONNARD(Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867 - 1947 Le
Cannet)
Paysage, Arbres fruitiers. Circa 1909.
Oil on paper mounted on canvas.
With signature stamp lower left: Bonnard.
48 x 62 cm.
We thank Dr. Bettina Best for her accade-
mic research.
Provenance:
- Estate of the artist.
- Private collection, Paris.
Literature:
- Dauberville, Jean/Dauberville, Henry:
Bonnard. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre
peint, vol. IV, 1940-47 et supplement,
Paris 1974, vol. IV, no. 01949, p. 285 (with
ill.).
- Cahn, Isabelle: Bonnard. Peintre l'Arcadie.
Exhib. cat., Musée d'Orsay, Paris 2015.
From 1909, Bonnard travelled almost
every year to the Midi. In June of 1909 he
travelled to the Côte d’Azur for the first
time. Fellow painter and friend Henri Man-
guin had invited him to Maleribes, today a
suburb of St. Tropez. Bonnard and Manguin
shared a passion for nature, landscape and
colour.
Bonnard returned again and again to St.
Tropez, Grasse, Cannes and Le Cannet,
until, in 1926, he bought himself a small
house in the hills above Cannet with a view
of the Mediterranean, which he christened
“Le bosquet” (the wood grove). There he
spent the best part of his twilight years
until 1947.
During Bonnard’s first visit to the Midi, he
created the present painting of landscape,
trees and fruit trees. This peaceful and
light-filled place inspired Bonnard towards
the glowing sensuousness and vitality of
colour. The painter transformed himself
into a magician of colour. His palette beca-
me lighter, the landscape became a lived
environment of the open air, and his pictu-
res captured that power of colours, which
remain sharp and true: blue shadows,
yellowmeadows, orange leaves, intensely
hued sky, ultimately replaced the hitherto
muted palette of the Paris-based painter.
In contrast to the pictures by his friend
Henri Manguin, we can call Bonnard’s
creations “constructed pictures”. These
are spaces in which the imagination can
unfold. In our painting, the framework of
branches sinks into the darkness of the
foliage to become a cooling blue dense
mass – the external space of the garden
contrasting with the internal space of the
tree crown. Beneath the shady canopy,
the path in the meadow becomes lost, its
edge marked by the peasant woman bent
over her work at the front edge of the pic-
ture. Thoughts may stroll along this path,
becoming lost in the distance with sleepy
daydreams in a sensuous garden paradise,
where the golden orange radiates summer
heat.
In his typical way, the painter has divided
the largescale landscape into various
sections: the crowns of the trees, the
background, a strangely abstract triangular
form on the left edge of the picture, and a
section rendered in loose brush strokes in
the upper left corner. A street marks the
limit of the sunny area of fields leading into
the distance. On the other side, the red
roofs of the houses of Maleribes gleam
overhead, leading one’s gaze from the
height of the hill of Villa Demière down and
up again into the breadth of the sky: along
the elevated horizon, our idyllic rustic gar-
den marks the edge of this self-contained
cosmos.
The painter has depicted each section
from a different vantage point. They stand
together as in a collage, and, in an extraor-
dinary way, they convey a total impression
of a space, which certainly the human eye
could encompass, but not the photo-
graphic lens. Bonnard himself called this
compositional method an “adventure of
the optic nerve”. In our picture, the spatial
interlacing and ambiguous positioning of
the various sections, run contrary to the
ostensible impression of harmony. The
subtle interplay of various spatial effects
and nuanced colouring brings time to a
halt in a moment of Arcadian fulfilment.
The scene in our painting - landscape,
trees and fruit trees - was depicted
again by Bonnard in his work of almost
the same dimensions – “Le Linge”. Jean
und Henry Dauberville date this and our
painting to the period around 1909. Both
paintings come from the artist’s estate
and are included in the supplement to the
catalogue raisonné under numbers 01948
and 01949.
CHF 80 000 / 120 000
(€ 74 070 / 111 110)