.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In 1910, Bonnard first rented and then bought 'Ma Roulette', a villa overlooking the Seine outside Vernonnet, across the river from Vernon. Vernonnet was only a short distance from Monet at Giverny and both painters often spent time together. However, while Monet loved his meticulous gardens and delighted in the more orderly aspects of the landscape, Bonnard focused on the more luxuriant aspect of the countryside. In La Seine Vernonnet, there is a sense of the splendid and undisciplined aspect of nature channelled only by the languorous decorative style the artist inherited from the Nabis.
When he painted La Seine Vernonnet, Bonnard divided his time between the north and the south of France, spending the winters in Le Cannet, where he had bought a villa in 1925, and the summers at Vernonnet. As Nicholas Watkins observes, Bonnard found the motifs around his house 'Ma Roulette' endlessly stimulating, and he tackled them with all the enthusiasm and freshness of an artist oblivious to what others had done before him. He needed, as he said, the lush pastures and passing clouds of the north as a fitting complement to the heat and timelessness of the south, in the same way that an intense red engenders a green after-image' (N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 127).
When he painted La Seine Vernonnet, Bonnard divided his time between the north and the south of France, spending the winters in Le Cannet, where he had bought a villa in 1925, and the summers at Vernonnet. As Nicholas Watkins observes, Bonnard found the motifs around his house 'Ma Roulette' endlessly stimulating, and he tackled them with all the enthusiasm and freshness of an artist oblivious to what others had done before him. He needed, as he said, the lush pastures and passing clouds of the north as a fitting complement to the heat and timelessness of the south, in the same way that an intense red engenders a green after-image' (N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 127).