Pierre Bonnard - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • “In painting, you will never succeed in rendering reality when it is already perfect. The point is not to paint life, but to bring painting to life.”
    —Pierre Bonnard

    Pierre Bonnard’s Jardin au bord de la Seine depicts a glimpse of the artist’s home garden at Vernonnet, a small hamlet outside of Paris known as Ma Roulette. Painted circa 1912, the same year Bonnard purchased this home with Marthe, his artistic muse who would soon become his wife, this intimate scene shows a view of the garden from their dining room, dominated by a delicate, budding tree in the center of the composition. Bonnard would live at Vernonnet with Marthe until the 1920s, and just a few miles down the Seine lived the artist’s dear friend, and fellow Impressionist, Claude Monet at Giverny. While both artists deeply cherished the verdant Seine Valley, Bonnard’s landscapes follow stricter representations of the natural world, albeit submerged with abstractions of form. One of the great colorists of the 20th century, Bonnard uses color to animate the painting with a sacred quality, one that brings forth an almost spiritual experience, a quality which immediately relates him to his Nabis contemporaries.

     

    Pierre Bonnard, The Dining Room in the Country, 1913, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Image: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The John R. Van Derlip Fund, 54.15

    In Bonnard’s oeuvre, his landscapes oscillate between grand, panoramic murals, and narrow, more personal perspectives of the outside world, as seen through an open window or a fenced gate. The present work belongs to this latter group, in which the landscape is treated with intimate care, arranging the subject delicately, as if a still life. Jardin au bord de la Seine succeeds in showing the range of techniques utilized by Bonnard in the last stage of his career, particularly in his use of color. Every field on the picture plane in the present work is imbued with a rich green, whether made obvious in the grass and flowers in the lower half of the composition or hidden adeptly in the blues of the horizon. This pseudo-monochromatic nature results in a heroically modern flatness, which recalls the perspective of his predecessor, Paul Cézanne. Balancing stylized representation with vibrant abstraction, Bonnard creates a point of view that is instantly recognizable, one which serves as a celebration of his artistic voice in the mythos of Modernism.

     

    Maurice Denis, Springtime, 1894-1899, Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of David Allen Devrishian, 1999, 1999.180.2a,b

    Like his Nabis contemporaries, Bonnard’s artistic output is often laden with nomadic voyages, charismatic lovers, and spiritual iconography. What Jardin au bord de la Seine offers instead is a peek behind the curtain of the more domestic side of the artist’s life. Departing from the Nabis’ sensibility of imbuing spiritual symbolism into their works, in the present work, Bonnard obfuscates the landscape of any deeper meaning, and favors the delicate depiction of his garden view over more overt symbolism. Nabis symbolism progresses to be more subtle as they moved into the 20th century, but they maintained an esoteric, dream-like state that we see in Jardin au bord de la Seine. Although devoid of meaning, Bonnard might be suggesting the central tree as a stand-in for the crucifix, comforting the viewer with themes of the rebirth of Christ, coinciding with the holiday of Easter. In the present work, Bonnard is offering the viewer a chance to meditate on the contradictions that come with the onset of spring through a vibrant, intimate setting.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Estate of the Artist
      Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., New York (acquired by 1965)
      Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 1967)
      Sotheby's, New York, May 6, 2015, lot 326
      Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

    • Literature

      Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint 1906–1919, vol. II, Paris, 1968, no. 700, p. 264 (illustrated)
      Bonnard's Worlds, exh. cat., Kimbell Art Museum, Houston, and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2023, fig. 13, p. 41 (illustrated; titled Garden on the Banks of the Seine)

Property from an Important Private American Collection

119

Jardin au bord de la Seine

stamped with the artist's signature "Bonnard" lower right
oil on canvas
34 x 30 in. (86.4 x 76.2 cm)
Painted circa 1912.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024