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Lot Essay
Painted immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War and just a few months before Bonnard's death at the age of seventy-nine, Paysage au toit rouge occupies a critical place in the artist's oeuvre. The landscape was painted at Le Bosquet, a modest villa in the town of Le Cannet, near Cannes, where Bonnard spent the last two decades of his life. It depicts the view from the narrow balcony outside the bathroom, looking over the artist's garden and the rooftops of Le Cannet. The orange zone at the bottom of the canvas represents a projecting roof, and the framing element on the left is the east face of the house, viewed at a very narrow angle. A figure is faintly discernible in the lower left corner of the canvas, leaning out of the window of the guest bedroom to shake out a piece of cloth (fig. 1). Within this rectilinear framework, the entire canvas is covered in touches of brilliant color, transforming the landscape into an abstract, vegetal tapestry. Discussing this painting, Timothy Hyman has written,
By the time Bonnard began Paysage au toit rouge, the war was over and there was a mood everywhere of a new beginning. The orange-red of the foreground and the green area along the right edge are both pitched to an astonishing intensity, unparalleled even in his own work, and almost impossible to experience in reproduction. These two areas of flat color read as contrasted curtains being drawn back, to reveal between them a blossoming world--white and yellow jewels set in a bluish darkness. The mark is now everywhere expressive, in direction, in thickness, as though the brush were totally an extension of mind and spirit. To the much younger painter Bazaine he confided, 'I'm only just beginning to understand what it is to paint. One ought to start all over again' (op cit., pp. 201-203).
Bonnard moved to Le Cannet with his wife Marthe in 1926. The house that he purchased there, Le Bosquet, was set on a hillside overlooking the village of Le Cannet. A two-story structure with a pitched roof and a pink stucco façade, it was surrounded by a lush, secluded garden and boasted panoramic views of the Estérel mountains and the bay of Cannes. Immediately following his move, Bonnard set to work enlarging and renovating the house, adding a studio on the north side and installing electricity, central heat, running water, and large French windows that opened onto the garden. Between 1926 and 1947, Le Bosquet and its surroundings served as a continual source of creative inspiration for Bonnard. He produced more than two hundred paintings there, including landscapes, still-lifes, interiors, and a celebrated series depicting Marthe in her bath. By the time that he painted the present canvas, his life and art had become completely intertwined; as he wrote to Matisse from Le Bosquet in 1941, "As for moving into a palatial hotel for a little material comfort, I would lose the basis of my existence, the constant contact with nature, and my way of working" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1994, p. 40).
During the last years of his life, Bonnard was particularly drawn to the landscape around Le Bosquet, painting numerous views from the windows of the house and from the steep path leading down to it (fig. 2). He wrote to his nephew, Charles Terrasse, in 1939, "Nature is the only consolation at this time," and to the painter, Edouard Vuillard, the following year, "I am very interested in landscape, and my walks are filled with reflections on the subject" (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 217). In a diary entry from February 1940, Bonnard enumerated four different categories of landscape: "Spatial landscape with interesting foreground, intimate landscape with expressive objects, landscape with light effect predominating, decorative landscape little sky and furnished" (quoted in ibid., p. 217). He repeated these in a letter to Matisse later that year, adding that he saw "different things each day, the sky, the objects, all change continually, one can drown in it" (quoted in ibid., p. 217).
Describing Bonnard's late landscapes from Le Cannet, Nicholas Watkins has written, "While there is little of the programmatic about Bonnard's late landscapes, they are generally bolder, broader in execution, more colorful and decorative. Forms tend to merge with color in a soft-focused, pulpy iridescent glow, as though the whole canvas surface has been fingered into life" (ibid., p. 217). Likewise, in a discussion of the present painting, Denys Sutton concludes, "The finest of his late pictures throb with intensity. He secured a magical transformation of the real world so that the interior of his studio or his garden at Le Cannet assume an infectious radiance. His rich orchestration of color records a world which was on the verge of disappearing at the end of his life" (exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1966, p. 24).
The present painting appears in several photographs that Brassaï took in August of 1946, where it is one of four canvases pinned to the wall in Bonnard's studio (fig. 4). The canvas hanging beneath it, which depicts an almond tree in blossom, is the last painting that Bonnard made before his death in January 1947 (Dauberville no. 1692; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris).
(fig. 1) Photograph of Le Bosquet, viewed from the angle of the present painting. BARCODE 23657601
(fig. 2) Pierre Bonnard, La Descente au Cannet, 1940. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. BARCODE 23657618
(fig. 3) Bonnard in the studio at Le Bosquet, 1946. Photo, Henri Cartier-Bresson. BARCODE 23657625
By the time Bonnard began Paysage au toit rouge, the war was over and there was a mood everywhere of a new beginning. The orange-red of the foreground and the green area along the right edge are both pitched to an astonishing intensity, unparalleled even in his own work, and almost impossible to experience in reproduction. These two areas of flat color read as contrasted curtains being drawn back, to reveal between them a blossoming world--white and yellow jewels set in a bluish darkness. The mark is now everywhere expressive, in direction, in thickness, as though the brush were totally an extension of mind and spirit. To the much younger painter Bazaine he confided, 'I'm only just beginning to understand what it is to paint. One ought to start all over again' (op cit., pp. 201-203).
Bonnard moved to Le Cannet with his wife Marthe in 1926. The house that he purchased there, Le Bosquet, was set on a hillside overlooking the village of Le Cannet. A two-story structure with a pitched roof and a pink stucco façade, it was surrounded by a lush, secluded garden and boasted panoramic views of the Estérel mountains and the bay of Cannes. Immediately following his move, Bonnard set to work enlarging and renovating the house, adding a studio on the north side and installing electricity, central heat, running water, and large French windows that opened onto the garden. Between 1926 and 1947, Le Bosquet and its surroundings served as a continual source of creative inspiration for Bonnard. He produced more than two hundred paintings there, including landscapes, still-lifes, interiors, and a celebrated series depicting Marthe in her bath. By the time that he painted the present canvas, his life and art had become completely intertwined; as he wrote to Matisse from Le Bosquet in 1941, "As for moving into a palatial hotel for a little material comfort, I would lose the basis of my existence, the constant contact with nature, and my way of working" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1994, p. 40).
During the last years of his life, Bonnard was particularly drawn to the landscape around Le Bosquet, painting numerous views from the windows of the house and from the steep path leading down to it (fig. 2). He wrote to his nephew, Charles Terrasse, in 1939, "Nature is the only consolation at this time," and to the painter, Edouard Vuillard, the following year, "I am very interested in landscape, and my walks are filled with reflections on the subject" (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 217). In a diary entry from February 1940, Bonnard enumerated four different categories of landscape: "Spatial landscape with interesting foreground, intimate landscape with expressive objects, landscape with light effect predominating, decorative landscape little sky and furnished" (quoted in ibid., p. 217). He repeated these in a letter to Matisse later that year, adding that he saw "different things each day, the sky, the objects, all change continually, one can drown in it" (quoted in ibid., p. 217).
Describing Bonnard's late landscapes from Le Cannet, Nicholas Watkins has written, "While there is little of the programmatic about Bonnard's late landscapes, they are generally bolder, broader in execution, more colorful and decorative. Forms tend to merge with color in a soft-focused, pulpy iridescent glow, as though the whole canvas surface has been fingered into life" (ibid., p. 217). Likewise, in a discussion of the present painting, Denys Sutton concludes, "The finest of his late pictures throb with intensity. He secured a magical transformation of the real world so that the interior of his studio or his garden at Le Cannet assume an infectious radiance. His rich orchestration of color records a world which was on the verge of disappearing at the end of his life" (exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1966, p. 24).
The present painting appears in several photographs that Brassaï took in August of 1946, where it is one of four canvases pinned to the wall in Bonnard's studio (fig. 4). The canvas hanging beneath it, which depicts an almond tree in blossom, is the last painting that Bonnard made before his death in January 1947 (Dauberville no. 1692; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris).
(fig. 1) Photograph of Le Bosquet, viewed from the angle of the present painting. BARCODE 23657601
(fig. 2) Pierre Bonnard, La Descente au Cannet, 1940. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. BARCODE 23657618
(fig. 3) Bonnard in the studio at Le Bosquet, 1946. Photo, Henri Cartier-Bresson. BARCODE 23657625