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Lot Essay
In contrast to some of Bonnard’s later intimiste interiors, this work by the Post-Impressionist master captures a bustling street scene from fin de siècle Paris. The young artist lived in the city from the late 1880s until the early 1890s and made a habit of walking the streets each morning, sketching the constantly changing spectacle of everyday people and places that inspired him. His paintings from this period are among the most evocative of the heyday of the great metropolis. Personnages dans la rue shows spontaneously unposed figures as they parade this way and that, busy with their own affairs, disregarding both artist and viewer. The scene almost seems to anticipate the Lumière Brothers’ ‘actualities’, short films of urban life that gave birth to the Cinématographe the following year.
It is easy now to forget how radical it was for artists to depict normal life instead of salon-worthy academic subjects. Using techniques which renounced photographic realism, as the Impressionists had also done, but with a bold new level of expressive mark-making, the present work is a fine example of this progressivism, and of Bonnard’s unique pictorial vision with its tableau-like portrayal of metropolitan life that was at once modish and gritty.
In common with some of his fellow Nabis artists, Rousell and Vuillard in particular, the energy of Bonnard’s choppy, blurry and dabbing brushstrokes was used to convey his feelings for the restive time and place he wanted to depict rather than the pursuit of straightforward verisimilitude. Personnages dans la rue is about people’s activity, their shifting movement, their status, and the general pell-mell tumult of modern city life.
In the left foreground a woman carrying a shopping basket has her head bent down, watching her step while hitching her skirt a little to avoid puddles or city pavement detritus, the white of her hat feather echoed by the white pipe of the pot-bellied figure behind, the newspaper under the arm of the rightward-walking figure and the white placards propped against the shop window in the background – Paris is ever the place of marches and merchandise. On the right meanwhile, two apparently masterless dogs enjoy their own freedom of the streets, they too are haphazardly crossing paths but appear just as purposefully intent on destinations as their human counterparts.
The street is the place for all classes and ages, their winter-black clothing the sole visually democratizing feature of the scene but with hats demarcating status, nevertheless. Top hats gleam from the centre of the work, worn by the wealthy male upper echelons of society while the bowler and fedora sit on the heads of the middling and lower classes. Meanwhile, the millinery of the female figures in the left foreground (fashionable but practical) and background (black-plumed, grandly funereal) gestures at differences easily decoded at the time.
Bonnard coined the phrase ‘the theatre of the everyday’ to describe his depictions of spontaneous and serendipitous interactions on the street, ‘the faculty of distilling emotion from the most modest acts of life.’ (cited in Bonnard by Timothy Hyman, London: Thames & Hudson, 1998, p. 50). The present work shows passersby each at their own level moving through their shared city space, embedded belongingly in their milieu, each playing their roles in the dramas of their respective lives brought fleetingly together for this particular belle époque production.
It is easy now to forget how radical it was for artists to depict normal life instead of salon-worthy academic subjects. Using techniques which renounced photographic realism, as the Impressionists had also done, but with a bold new level of expressive mark-making, the present work is a fine example of this progressivism, and of Bonnard’s unique pictorial vision with its tableau-like portrayal of metropolitan life that was at once modish and gritty.
In common with some of his fellow Nabis artists, Rousell and Vuillard in particular, the energy of Bonnard’s choppy, blurry and dabbing brushstrokes was used to convey his feelings for the restive time and place he wanted to depict rather than the pursuit of straightforward verisimilitude. Personnages dans la rue is about people’s activity, their shifting movement, their status, and the general pell-mell tumult of modern city life.
In the left foreground a woman carrying a shopping basket has her head bent down, watching her step while hitching her skirt a little to avoid puddles or city pavement detritus, the white of her hat feather echoed by the white pipe of the pot-bellied figure behind, the newspaper under the arm of the rightward-walking figure and the white placards propped against the shop window in the background – Paris is ever the place of marches and merchandise. On the right meanwhile, two apparently masterless dogs enjoy their own freedom of the streets, they too are haphazardly crossing paths but appear just as purposefully intent on destinations as their human counterparts.
The street is the place for all classes and ages, their winter-black clothing the sole visually democratizing feature of the scene but with hats demarcating status, nevertheless. Top hats gleam from the centre of the work, worn by the wealthy male upper echelons of society while the bowler and fedora sit on the heads of the middling and lower classes. Meanwhile, the millinery of the female figures in the left foreground (fashionable but practical) and background (black-plumed, grandly funereal) gestures at differences easily decoded at the time.
Bonnard coined the phrase ‘the theatre of the everyday’ to describe his depictions of spontaneous and serendipitous interactions on the street, ‘the faculty of distilling emotion from the most modest acts of life.’ (cited in Bonnard by Timothy Hyman, London: Thames & Hudson, 1998, p. 50). The present work shows passersby each at their own level moving through their shared city space, embedded belongingly in their milieu, each playing their roles in the dramas of their respective lives brought fleetingly together for this particular belle époque production.