Lot 3 Dα

In August 1912 Pierre Bonnard purchased the country house “La Roulotte” (i.e. the “gypsy caravan”) in Vernon, a small village on the Seine to the north-west of Paris. Much like Claude Monet, who was a friend of the artist and lived in Giverny, not far from Vernon, he often went out with his boat and painted the peaceful riverscape. Like Monet before him, the wooded course of the river exercised a great fascination on Bonnard for years.
For his painting “La Seine à Vernon”, Bonnard has taken up a vantage point on the river’s left bank to view the slowly flowing water, the lush vegetation on the left and the opposite bank. The topographical elements are heavily simplified and are summarised in green or blue zones of colour. It is only by means of chromatic nuances – a scale of shades of green and purple – that he succeeds in distinguishing and defining the individual elements of the picture. This evocative landscape painting thus belongs to a group of works in which Bonnard distances himself from the aesthetic of the “Nabis” and returns back to a bright and diffuse application of paint in the sense of the impressionists. In these landscapes, he once again moves closer to his role model and friend Monet by dissolving his motifs into short strokes and little fields of colour. With a refined chromatic subtlety, long-stemmed shrubs, massive trees and little waves emerge before our eyes on the peacefully flowing river. The slightly cloudy, light blue sky contributes to the cheerful atmosphere of a summer day.