Pierre Bonnard

Ambroise Vollard, Paris (acquired from the artist)
Private Collection, Europe

Tokyo, Gallery Yoshii, Bonnard, peintre de couleurs merveilleuses, 1973, no. 6, illustrated in the catalogue
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Bonnard dans sa lumière, 1975, no. 8, illustrated in the catalogue

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1974, vol. IV, no. 1793bis, illustrated p. 180 and illustrated in colour
Marcel Arland & Jean Leymarie, Bonnard dans sa lumière, Paris, 1978, no. 8, illustrated p. 46

The board is laid down on cradled panel and is stable. There are two small spots of retouching under the boat, and one small spot of retouching in the middle of the extreme top edge, visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from a tiny surface dent towards the middle of the left edge, this work is in very good condition. Colours: In comparison with the printed catalogue illustration, the colours are overall stronger and the green in the water is more pronounced in the original.
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Pierre Bonnard was one of the foremost members of the Nabis – a short-lived but widely influential grouping of avant-garde artists who banded together at the Académie Julian in Paris in the late 1880s. They shared a common intent to emancipate painting from subservience to objective reality by synthesising images taken from the world around them with an internalised and expressive symbolism. Stylistically, this was manifest in the use of unmodulated patches of colour which emphasise the two-dimensionality of the pictorial plane. Naturalism was replaced by a revolutionary set of aesthetic values which prioritised bold, decorative forms over those determined by perspective or proportion.

 

Remorqueur, pont sur La Seine is a great example of Bonnard's early Post-Impressionist style. The landscape is probably based upon a semi-urban location just outside of Paris, as indicated by the train of horses, carriages and people which traverse the bridge in the upper section. This bridge divides the composition into three distinct horizontal and vertical areas, imbuing the image with a sense of harmony and balance. Bonnard's flat rendering of the river-scape is entirely consistent with Nabi principles, and gives equal weight and materiality to all features in the composition.

 

The present view of the Seine has been tempered by Bonnard's own aesthetic vision, replacing the incidental with the imagined. As Elizabeth Hutton Turner has commented, 'this is the Bonnard who built a bridge between Claude Monet's Impressionism and Stéphane Mallarmé's Symbolism... the Bonnard whose canvases created a playground for the eye and mind with tools worthy of the Dadaists and Surrealists: namely a fantasy of painting with light' (E. Hutton Turner in Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late (exhibition catalogue), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 52).