Lot Essay
The present work is a view of Bonnard's dining room at his house near Le Cannet in the South of France. Belinda Thomson writes, "Bonnard comes close to the flat patterned surface of Matisse in this strikingly simple gouache, exploiting the garish contrast of yellow/red so frequently found in his Le Bousquet interiors. His viewpoint is just inches to the right of the one adopted in Marthe in the Dining Room 1933 but here the dark blue wedge to the right suggests the outside was in darkness and the empty dining room is illuminated electrically - hence the brilliant bands of contrasting tone from the yellow-orange of the table's surface, through the cloth's local colour red to the purplish shadow beneath the table to the repeated band of yellow where the light once again hits the carpet." (Bonnard at Le Bousquet, London, 1994, p. 97).