皮耶·博納爾

Estate of the artist

Acquired from the above by the family of the present owners in the 1950s

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Pierre Bonnard, 1966, no. 104 (titled Le jardin: cactus)

Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria; Adelaide, The Art Gallery of South Australia; Perth, The Art Gallery of Western Australia & Sydney, Australia Museum, Pierre Bonnard, 1971, no. 8, illustrated in the catalogue

Johannesburg, Johannesburgse Kunsmuseum, Pierre Bonnard, 1971-72, no. 8

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard, catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Paris, 1973, vol. II, no. 725, illustrated p. 284

The canvas is lined. There is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. Apart from an area of fluorescence along all four edges, which appears to be due to an earlier turnover edge, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the green tones are brighter in the original.
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Coin de jardin fleuri, also known as Cactus, painted in 1912, is an exemplary work which demonstrates Bonnard’s delight in painting domestic landscapes. This lusciously hued canvas depicts the corner of a garden overlooking a cerulean blue horizon which the artist has entirely saturated with light and colour. In the summer of 1912 Bonnard and his model and companion Marthe visited Grasse in the south of France, before returning to Normandy and purchasing a house in the hamlet of Vernonnet called 'Ma Roulotte', where they lived until the late 1920s. Vernonnet is situated only a couple of miles west of Giverny, where Monet had lived and worked for nearly thirty years, and the two men became close friends. Bonnard’s garden scenes delighted in a typically post-impressionist rejection of traditional perspective, but unlike his new neighbour, he never resorted to pure abstraction. Jean-Louis Prat notes: ‘Bonnard always developed his own visual language, firmly rooted in reality. He did not, like Monet, virtually do away with the subject itself. He always used forms, without experimenting with abstraction, or even contemplating it’ (J.-L. Prat, ‘Pierre Bonnard or An Enduring Painter’ in Bonnard(exhibition catalogue), Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 1999, p. 19). Bonnard’s pictures - composed of pure colours and displaying a limited perspective - captured views of untrammelled wild flowers, exotic foliage and trees against clear skies and evoking an identifiable sense of edenic exuberance.

The present work marks the beginning of the final stage in Bonnard’s maturation as a painter. Throughout the following three decades the artist concentrated on depicting his immediate surroundings in a purely tonal fashion. The artist wrote: ‘Colour alone will suffice to express all one wants to say... there is no need for highlighting or modelling in painting. It seemed possible for me to reproduce light, shape and character by the use of colour alone, without the help of any values’ (quoted in Antoine Terrasse, ‘Some Thoughts on Pierre Bonnard’ in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Galerie Salis, Salzburg, 1991, n.p.). Furthermore Bonnard stated in 1935: ‘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 ibid., n.p.).