Armistice

Nocturnal scenes had become so commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century that Paul Desjardins devoted to them an entire sub-section of his review of the Salons for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, entitling it 'Les Heures, principalement du soir et de la nuit'. Bonnard had explored the Nocturne and its softening effects on scenes of Paris street life as early as 1895. His approach had been to create a duality of light and darkness by punctuating the night with street lights or with gaily dressed characters who appear starkly against a dark background (fig. 1). Bonnard used the same technique in his intimist interiors; like Vuillard who subsequently developed the subject and made it his own, he would articulate the dim interior with elements of artificial light, creating pockets of brightness in an otherwise subdued setting.

By the time of the armistice agreement of 1918 which marked the end of the Great War, Bonnard's use of colour and light had undergone a radical change. He had embraced the light and atmosphere of the South of France during his second trip in 1909 and, as a result, his palette had become bolder and he had adopted the strong colouring that characterises his later style. Armistice concentrates less on darkness than on the depiction of night through the use of colour. The only darkness is the small area of sky at the upper centre; the rest of the composition relies on subdued, but strong colours, from the orange of the lanterns and the carousel to the blues of the soldiers' uniforms as they dance in the streets.