Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Pierre Bonnard
Fontenay aux Roses 1867 - 1947 Le Cannet
38
Family Scene: Mother and Baby
Watercolour heightened with white gouache, over graphite. Signed top left with a monogram in graphite,
emphasised with blue watercolour, and again with a larger monogram in graphite alone in the top left corner.
Image: 285 x 172 mm (11 ½ x 6 ¾ in.). Sheet: 318 x 198 mm (12 ½ x 7 ¾ in.)
Provenance: Maurice Terrasse.
Literature: Francis Bouvet, introduction by Antoine
Terrasse, Bonnard, the complete graphic work,
London, 1981, p.18, under cat.4; Exhibition Catalogue,
Metropolitan Museum, New York, Colta Ives et al.,
Pierre Bonnard, The Graphic Art, 1989, p.214; Galerie
Berès, Les Peintres Graveurs 1890-1900, Paris 2002,
p.9, fig.10.
Terrasse, their babies and their friends. Bonnard let
free his passionate enjoyment of family life to become
a dominant theme in his paintings and graphic art
of the early 1890s. However, this was in fact part of
what appears as a small current movement focusing
on domesticity and, particularly, maternal love. Renoir
Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Berès, Bonnard Illustrateur,
1970, cat.2, ‘Mère et Enfant’.
Bonnard, who had been an excellent student at the
prestigious Lycée Charlemagne in Paris obtained his
license at the law school, the Faculté de Droit, in
1888. During this same year, he enrolled at the École
des Beaux-Arts, promising his father not to give up
law but devoting more and more time to art. Forming
friendship with Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis, he
helped found the group known as the Nabis (Hebrew
for prophets) and the following year he met Edouard
Vuillard with whom he quickly forged a close artistic
and personal allegiance. Bonnard’s first success was to
win a competition for a poster to advertise champagne,
for which he was paid and the design noticed and
admired by Toulouse Lautrec. In 1891, he was part of
the first group exhibition of the Nabis which was titled
Peintres impressionistes et symbolistes and that year
too he participated in the Salon des Indépendants.
Over the next ten years, he associated closely with
the Symbolist avant-garde and fell under the influence
of Paul Gauguin. Although he resisted the convoluted
theories of his fellow Nabis, Paul Sérusier and Maurice
Denis, he was moved by the currents of interest
in subjectivity and universality above naturalism.
Ambitious but shy, in Paris he immersed himself in
diverse artistic activity and challenging society and to
recover from the anxiety this way of life induced, he
retired regularly and for extended periods to the family
home, Le Clos, in the Isère. Here he immediately
became absorbed into the rural domestic world
gathered around his ageing father and animated by
his sister Andrée, her husband the musician Claude
1. Pierre Bonnard, Family Scene, watercolour, Private collection.
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