Nude against the light. Pierre Bonnard · Public domain · source

Pierre Bonnard

Public domain1867-1947·French·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

French painter and printmaker, born at Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1867 and died at Le Cannet in 1947. A founding member of the Nabis, nicknamed "le Nabi tres japonard" for his love of Japanese prints, he made posters and lithographs in the 1890s before becoming the painter of domestic interiors, gardens and his partner Marthe.

Why they matter

His first poster, France-Champagne (1889-1891), a lithograph in yellow, orange and black, showed what a young painter could do with flat colour and a Japanese-style silhouette, and it is the poster credited with inspiring Toulouse-Lautrec to make his first. Bonnard then turned to colour lithography as an art in itself, and his late paintings of rooms, baths and gardens make him one of the great colourists of the twentieth century.

What to buy

Prints: Met Custom Prints makes prints to order of the Met's own Bonnard paintings, and is the honest source for the interiors and gardens. The posters and the Paris lithographs are flat colour on paper, so a good reproduction loses less than a painting does. Book: Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art by Colta Ives, Helen Giambruni and Sasha M. Newman (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), the catalogue of the Met's exhibition of his graphic work, with a chronology of it; used copies are easy to find. Originals: his paintings are for the major houses only, but his lithographs are the realistic way to own Bonnard. Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris, twelve colour lithographs commissioned by Vollard and finished by 1899, was issued in an edition of 100, and single sheets from the set reach the market; dealers cite the Bouvet and Roger-Marx catalogues raisonnes, so ask which number a sheet is. A modern reproduction sold as a lithograph shows a regular printed dot screen under a loupe; a stone lithograph shows solid colour.

Notes

The Art Institute of Chicago holds the France-Champagne and La Revue Blanche posters, sheets from the Paris album and a copy of Parallelement, Verlaine's poems with 109 lithographs by Bonnard, published by Vollard in 1900. Another France-Champagne is in the Kunsthalle Bremen. Vollard's print albums did not sell in their day: by the Met catalogue's account the fin-de-siecle print market was glutted. Public domain, so images are free on Wikimedia Commons.

Story

Bonnard never quite let a painting go. The Nelson-Atkins Museum's Still Life with Guelder Roses was painted in 1892 and given to a collector, yet its technical study shows that Bonnard went back to it in 1929, nearly four decades later, added dabs of blue-grey and yellow-grey to the blossoms and orange along the edges of the cloth, and signed it again. The museum's catalogue notes that it was not unusual for him to revisit a canvas even after forty years.

The critic Georges Besson told a stronger version. According to him, Bonnard carried a tiny box holding two or three tubes of paint and a small brush in his pocket, and at the museum in Grenoble and then at the Luxembourg in Paris he watched for the guard to pass into the next room before furtively "improving" one of his own pictures with a few touches. The Nelson-Atkins presents this as Besson's anecdote, not established fact. The 1929 repainting, though, is documented in the paint itself, and it fits: a finished picture on a museum wall was, to its maker, still work in progress.

Key works

France-Champagne (1889-1891) - Art Institute of Chicago
La Revue Blanche (1894) - Art Institute of Chicago
Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (1899) - Art Institute of Chicago
Parallelement (Verlaine) (1900) - Art Institute of Chicago
Dining Room in the Country (1913) - Minneapolis Institute of Art
Earthly Paradise (1916-1920) - Art Institute of Chicago

Pierre Bonnard

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

Originals

See also