Assiette de fruits ou Les pommes

In the 1930s, Bonnard turned increasingly to painting still lifes inside Le Bosquet, his modest house at La Cannet near Cannes. The domestic interior had been a major theme for Bonnard throughout his career but, as he grew older and Marthe's health declined, he withdrew from the world and relied on his own environment as stimulus for his painting. According to Nicholas Watkins: "Still-life, being the most manipulable of the genres, proved an ideal vehicle for aesthetic exploration...Objects were not so much painted as felt into shape within the surface over a long period. 'The principal subject,' Bonnard maintained, 'is the surface which has color, its laws over and above those of the objects'" (N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, pp. 168 and 171). Bonnard carefully arranged his objects to create a strong sense of visual rhythm. In Assiette de fruits ou Les pommes a decorative patterning is achieved by the overlapping forms and vibrant colors of the different fruits. Moreover, Bonnard creates an ambiguity of spatial handling by placing the arrangement at the forefront of the composition and against a neutral background.

As Charles Sterling observes: "His still lifes are assortments of fruit on tables or in cupboards exposed to the sun; but departing from the Impressionists' literal-minded naturalism, he gives them an air of strange enchantment. His objects are pervaded by the light and heat of the sun, whose rays seem to melt down the fruits to a colored essence of their flesh and their taste--his interiors are fragrant with it" (C. Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, New York, 1981, p. 124).