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拍品專文
The present painting depicts Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard's lifelong partner and muse (and from 1925, his wife), day dreaming in an armchair on a summer’s day. During the 1920s, Bonnard turned for his subject matter more and more to the rooms in which he lived, painting intimate still-life and interior compositions. Far from fleeting impressions, these paintings are meditations on the people, places, and things that surrounded Bonnard. He explained, “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., The Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 9). Marthe is a pervasive presence in these paintings, sometimes hovering on the periphery of the scene, other times (as here) providing the focal point of the composition. Timothy Hyman has written, “Bonnard's art becomes 'about' Marthe, centered in this single person, to a degree unprecedented in any earlier painting... It was his desire to draw and paint her, more than anything else, that brought about the development of his style, from its brilliant decorative beginnings to the formal strength and realism of its maturity” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 129).
Bonnard depicted Marthe in a variety of different spaces at his various homes: most often, the garden, the dining room, the sitting room, and the bathroom, where she spent hours each day washing and soaking as a treatment for chronic ill health. His working practice was to sketch from life and then paint from memory in the studio; as he explained, “There is always the risk with direct observation that [the painter] will become sidetracked by incidentals and lose sight of the initial idea” (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 64).
In Jeune femme rêvant dans un fauteuil, Marthe appears to be daydreaming in a comfortable chair, her arms lightly leaning on the armrests. Although she was in her fifties when the canvas was painted, Bonnard portrays her in her mid-twenties, the age that she was when they first met. Sasha Newman has explained, "As Marthe aged, Bonnard continued to paint her looking almost exactly as she had done when young. One can sense the idealism, the tenderness, and the dreams of his youth which inspired these images of the solitary, haunting figure of Marthe" (Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 196).
In Bonnard's paintings of Marthe, she rarely acknowledges the presence of the artist or the viewer; instead, she is shown sunken into her own thoughts, her head bowed in a posture of melancholy and self-absorption, or occasionally asleep. "This dreaming feminine presence Marthe... is central to the air of mystery, of hidden sadness in much of Bonnard's art" (ibid., p. 146). The paintings of Marthe often suggest a stolen glance of a private moment.
In the case of Jeune femme rêvant dans un fauteuil, his initial impetus–that crucial, first visual idea that he would enrich and transform into a decorative whole–was most likely the harmonie rose that Bonnard had observed. Seated in the livingroom, Marthe's face and body appears to have a soft rosy glow. Bonnard is known to have studied the effects of light by pinning small pieces of reflective foil wrappers to his studio wall and watching their scintillations, and in 1941 he told a visitor, “It is enough for the painter if windows are sufficiently large to allow the full radiance of daylight to penetrate, like lightning, so that all its nuances can strike everything it happens to encounter” (quoted in ibid., p. 23). Here, Marthe's shirt is a luminous blush color, and her flesh, like the wall behind her, is awash in rich maroon and heightened by small patches of violet shadow. The vibrant palette of the painting creates a visual tension with the meditative mood. Marthe herself seems still and unchanging, an image embalmed in memory. Sarah Whitfield has explained, “Bonnard is a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure. His celebration of life is one side of a coin, the other side of which is always present–a lament for transience” (ibid., p. 29).
Bonnard depicted Marthe in a variety of different spaces at his various homes: most often, the garden, the dining room, the sitting room, and the bathroom, where she spent hours each day washing and soaking as a treatment for chronic ill health. His working practice was to sketch from life and then paint from memory in the studio; as he explained, “There is always the risk with direct observation that [the painter] will become sidetracked by incidentals and lose sight of the initial idea” (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 64).
In Jeune femme rêvant dans un fauteuil, Marthe appears to be daydreaming in a comfortable chair, her arms lightly leaning on the armrests. Although she was in her fifties when the canvas was painted, Bonnard portrays her in her mid-twenties, the age that she was when they first met. Sasha Newman has explained, "As Marthe aged, Bonnard continued to paint her looking almost exactly as she had done when young. One can sense the idealism, the tenderness, and the dreams of his youth which inspired these images of the solitary, haunting figure of Marthe" (Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 196).
In Bonnard's paintings of Marthe, she rarely acknowledges the presence of the artist or the viewer; instead, she is shown sunken into her own thoughts, her head bowed in a posture of melancholy and self-absorption, or occasionally asleep. "This dreaming feminine presence Marthe... is central to the air of mystery, of hidden sadness in much of Bonnard's art" (ibid., p. 146). The paintings of Marthe often suggest a stolen glance of a private moment.
In the case of Jeune femme rêvant dans un fauteuil, his initial impetus–that crucial, first visual idea that he would enrich and transform into a decorative whole–was most likely the harmonie rose that Bonnard had observed. Seated in the livingroom, Marthe's face and body appears to have a soft rosy glow. Bonnard is known to have studied the effects of light by pinning small pieces of reflective foil wrappers to his studio wall and watching their scintillations, and in 1941 he told a visitor, “It is enough for the painter if windows are sufficiently large to allow the full radiance of daylight to penetrate, like lightning, so that all its nuances can strike everything it happens to encounter” (quoted in ibid., p. 23). Here, Marthe's shirt is a luminous blush color, and her flesh, like the wall behind her, is awash in rich maroon and heightened by small patches of violet shadow. The vibrant palette of the painting creates a visual tension with the meditative mood. Marthe herself seems still and unchanging, an image embalmed in memory. Sarah Whitfield has explained, “Bonnard is a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure. His celebration of life is one side of a coin, the other side of which is always present–a lament for transience” (ibid., p. 29).