Lot Essay
Femme accoude avec chien et nature morte illustrates an intimate moment in the daily life of Pierre Bonnard. The figure is most likely his lifelong companion Marthe de Mligny (ne Maria Boursin) whom he met in 1893 and eventually married in 1925; she appears in over 300 of the artist's paintings. While the couple's beloved basset hound (another character who appears frequently in Bonnard's works) sits upright and bright-eyed, Marthe props her head at the breakfast table, her eyes shut, and appears to catch a few more moments of rest before the bright morning sun that silhouettes her head and shoulders permeates the entire room.
In the 1890s, the writer and art critic Andr Gide used the term intimisme to describe paintings that depicted scenes of daily life in domestic interiors by Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. These paintings of women resting, reading, sewing or setting the table, for example, recall the paintings of earlier artists like Johannes Vermeer (1632- 1675) and Jean-Simon Chardin (1699-1779). Bonnard professed his admiration for Chardin throughout his life, but was also clearly influenced by his exposure to Japanese prints and the artistic innovations of the Impressionists. As one of the founding members of Les Nabis (which also included Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis, among others), Bonnard embraced the expressive potential of flat planes of color that characterized Japanese prints. In his words: "I realized that colour could express everything with no need for relief or texture I understood that it was possible to translate light, shapes and character by colour alone, without the need for values" (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 25). In Femme accoude avec chien et nature morte, Bonnard uses vivid colors and allows the blue and white checkerboard pattern of the figure's bathrobe to "flatten" the corporeal sense of the body. In contrast to earlier, more graphic versions of the theme (see Le corsage carreaux, 1892; coll. Muse d'Orsay, Paris, for example), here the two-dimensional pattern of the robe contrasts visually with the carefully modeled head, and with the table's diagonal edge that defines a recession into space.
Bonnard's integration of form and space in his paintings beginning around 1913 reflects the artist's reevaluation of Impressionism. As recounted by Bonnard: "When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists and try to take it further, we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of colour. Art is not nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of colour as a means of expression" (quoted in ibid, p. 61). Rather than allowing light to dissolve form into a loose array of strokes (as the Impressionists did), Bonnard gave light form and made it tangible; for example, the halo that crowns Marthe's head, the painted patch of sunlight on the table and the purple reflection that lines the interior of the robe's collar.
Bonnard's paintings always suggest a mood. They are not fleeting impressions, but meditations on the people, places and things that surrounded him. According to Bonnard: "The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world--the picture--which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him" (quoted in S. Whitfield and J. Elderfield, Bonnard, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 9). In Femme accoude avec chien et nature morte, Bonnard's "enclosed world" is bound by the edge of the table that runs flush with the canvas along the painting's bottom edge. In this compositional device, borrowed from Chardin, the edge of the painting becomes one with the edge of the kitchen table at which the viewer has been invited to take Bonnard's place and share in a moment of quiet intimacy.
In the 1890s, the writer and art critic Andr Gide used the term intimisme to describe paintings that depicted scenes of daily life in domestic interiors by Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. These paintings of women resting, reading, sewing or setting the table, for example, recall the paintings of earlier artists like Johannes Vermeer (1632- 1675) and Jean-Simon Chardin (1699-1779). Bonnard professed his admiration for Chardin throughout his life, but was also clearly influenced by his exposure to Japanese prints and the artistic innovations of the Impressionists. As one of the founding members of Les Nabis (which also included Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis, among others), Bonnard embraced the expressive potential of flat planes of color that characterized Japanese prints. In his words: "I realized that colour could express everything with no need for relief or texture I understood that it was possible to translate light, shapes and character by colour alone, without the need for values" (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 25). In Femme accoude avec chien et nature morte, Bonnard uses vivid colors and allows the blue and white checkerboard pattern of the figure's bathrobe to "flatten" the corporeal sense of the body. In contrast to earlier, more graphic versions of the theme (see Le corsage carreaux, 1892; coll. Muse d'Orsay, Paris, for example), here the two-dimensional pattern of the robe contrasts visually with the carefully modeled head, and with the table's diagonal edge that defines a recession into space.
Bonnard's integration of form and space in his paintings beginning around 1913 reflects the artist's reevaluation of Impressionism. As recounted by Bonnard: "When my friends and I decided to pick up the research of the Impressionists and try to take it further, we wanted to outshine them in their naturalistic impressions of colour. Art is not nature. We were stricter in composition. There was a lot more to be got out of colour as a means of expression" (quoted in ibid, p. 61). Rather than allowing light to dissolve form into a loose array of strokes (as the Impressionists did), Bonnard gave light form and made it tangible; for example, the halo that crowns Marthe's head, the painted patch of sunlight on the table and the purple reflection that lines the interior of the robe's collar.
Bonnard's paintings always suggest a mood. They are not fleeting impressions, but meditations on the people, places and things that surrounded him. According to Bonnard: "The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world--the picture--which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him" (quoted in S. Whitfield and J. Elderfield, Bonnard, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 9). In Femme accoude avec chien et nature morte, Bonnard's "enclosed world" is bound by the edge of the table that runs flush with the canvas along the painting's bottom edge. In this compositional device, borrowed from Chardin, the edge of the painting becomes one with the edge of the kitchen table at which the viewer has been invited to take Bonnard's place and share in a moment of quiet intimacy.