La sortie d'automne ou Les Elégantes

In Bonnard's 1908 painting La sortie d'automne ou Les Elégantes, three young people meet on a brisk autumnal afternoon. Together they amble through the wooded countryside, taking in the fall foliage. Here, the elegant trio is accompanied by two dogs: an energetic black hunting dog and a much smaller, fluffier white dog, who both wag their tails, embodying the playful mood of their human counterparts. Though their facial features are obscured, the figures assume casual postures, suggesting the intimacy of their encounter, even in the context of a sweeping landscape. The members of the small, elegant party are all fashionably dressed, wearing jaunty hats and swathed in layers of creamy white, yellow and tan. Their pale attire stands in contrast to the highly pigmented colors of the landscape that surround them. The leaves of the trees are formed by touches of salmon pink, marigold, lilac and fuchsia; the verdant grass is a kaleidoscope of greens; the rolling hills and sky in the background are baby pink and blue. In this way, Bonnard executed a radically modern, early twentieth-century version of a fête galante, the flirtatious landscape genre invented by the eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau.
Bonnard's brilliant, decorative vision of the natural world clearly prioritized color and texture over realism: his evocative painterly facture and colors define the composition, even more so than the social rituals of bourgeois elégantes, the details of their costumes or the landscape itself. As the Post-Impressionist painter once declared, "The principal subject is the surface, which has its color, its laws over and above those of objects. It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting” (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 171). In other words, for Bonnard, the aesthetic qualities of paint upon the surface of the canvas were of more interest to the artist than the depicted subject.
In 1908, when he painted La sortie d'automne ou Les Elégantes, Bonnard had not yet developed the shocking, acidic hues and the speckled, highly patterned surface textures that characterized some of his later landscapes—for example Paysage d'Automne, painted circa 1933, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Yet Bonnard had already rejected many academic conventions of landscape painting, particularly in terms of color, light, shadow and perspective. As he later asserted, “I have become a painter of landscapes, not because I have painted landscapes—I have done only a few—but because I have acquired the soul of a landscape painter insofar as I have been able to free myself of everything picturesque, aesthetical or any other convention that has been poisoning me” (quoted in A. Terrasse, “Some Thoughts on Pierre Bonnard” in Bonnard, exh. cat., Salzburg, 1991).