La corbeille de fruits

y the 1920s, Pierre Bonnard had cemented himself as a key figure in the history of French painting. A founding member of Les Nabis, along with the likes of Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Edouard Vuillard, Bonnard had explored the expressive dimensions of modern painting in the late nineteenth century.  However, by 1912, Bonnard began to spend much of his time away from Paris, and in that year, he purchased a modest villa at Vernonnet, a picturesque hamlet in the Seine Valley not far from Giverny. During the next four decades, the artist turned increasingly to the rooms in which he lived for subject matter, first at Vernonnet and later at Le Cannet. He opted to capture the rooms he inhabited with a warmth and emotive character only working from personal memory could afford. As Bonnard wrote, “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 Bonnard, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 9). These vividly-colored domestic scenes and still lifes, like La corbeille de fruits, would become hallmarks of the artist’s later oeuvre.
The present picture is a luminous example of the work from these years, when Bonnard turned his focus to conveying the daily rhythms of domestic life. His art became increasingly abstract, focusing on plays of color and texture rather than on the realistic depiction of objects. In the present work, the bright hues of the red-orange persimmons and the yellow-green grapes contact with the muted white cloth on the table. This juxtaposition lends the familiar still-life composition an air of unfamiliar but serene enchantment. Esteemed Bonnard scholar, John Rewald wrote of the artist, "With the exception of Vuillard, no painter of his generation was to endow his technique with so much sensual delight, so much feeling for the undefinable texture of paint, so much vibration. The sensitivity which guided his brush he infused into every particle of paint placed on the canvas; there is almost never any dryness, any dullness in his execution. His paintings…are covered with colors applied with a delicate voluptuousness that confers the pigment a life of its own and treats every single stroke like a clear note of a symphony. At the same time, Bonnard's colors changed from opaque to transparent and brilliant, and his perceptiveness seemed to grow as his brush found ever more expert and more subtle means to capture the richness both of his imagination and of nature" (in Pierre Bonnard, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, p. 48).