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Lot Essay
This richly colored and meditative scene depicts Marthe de Méligny–Bonnard’s lifelong partner and muse–in the dining room of the house that they shared at Vernonnet, her head bowed in a posture of self-absorption tinged with melancholy. Her fork hovers just above a plate of fried eggs, as yet untouched, suggesting a fleeting moment; the eggs themselves, with their connotations of birth and growth, hint too at what Bonnard called “the rapid, surprising action of time” (quoted in Bonnard, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 28). Yet Marthe herself seems utterly silent and still, like an image embalmed in memory. “Bonnard is a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure,” Sarah Whitfield has explained. “His celebration of life is one side of a coin, the other side of which is always present–a lament for transience” (ibid., p. 29).
After Bonnard and Marthe purchased their home at Vernonnet in 1912, the artist turned for his subject matter more and more to the quiet, well-trodden rooms in which he lived. “The artist who paints the emotions,” he explained, “creates an enclosed world–the picture–which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him” (quoted in ibid., p. 9). The year that he and Marthe finally married, in 1925, he painted her no fewer than ten times in the wood-paneled dining room, with its ornate fireplace and free-standing buffet. In the present example, a second plate is partially visible in the bottom right corner of the canvas–perhaps Bonnard’s own, a spare and eloquent testament to the domestic intimacy that the couple increasingly shared.
Although Le déjeuner depicts a humble, quotidian meal, the pervasive atmosphere is one of gentle reverie–of existence fleetingly registered on the boundary between reality and dreams. Marthe wears a boldly patterned, jewel-toned jacket with bands of complementary orange and blue that seem to be woven into the very architecture of the room, with its network of horizontals and verticals. Although her sloping shoulders occupy three-quarters of the width of the canvas, her body registers to the viewer within the warp and weft of the image only after a slight, almost imperceptible delay. Her face, in contrast, stands out round and luminously pale against the background, mirroring the plate of eggs. “This dreaming feminine presence, Marthe,” Sasha Newman has written, “is central to the underlying air of mystery, of hidden sadness in much of Bonnard’s art” (Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 146).
At Vernonnet, and later at Le Cannet, Bonnard searched in almost all his waking moments for the shock of an image, for its potential to become a painting. He made notes in his journal of color patterns or fleeting observations that sparked his impulse to begin a canvas and then painted from memory back in his studio, so as not to lose sight of his initial idea. The subject of Le déjeuner, then, is not so much Marthe at breakfast as it is Bonnard’s remembrance of the visual experience, re-composed and transformed through layers of brilliant color. “When in 1931 Bonnard defined painting as un arrêt du temps (‘a stilling of time’),” Timothy Hyman has concluded, “he implied a view of time very different from Impressionist instantaneity–from Monet’s serial moments of light. Bonnard could not go, like Monet, in search of his motif; the moment had already flowered, involuntary and unsought” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 93).
After Bonnard and Marthe purchased their home at Vernonnet in 1912, the artist turned for his subject matter more and more to the quiet, well-trodden rooms in which he lived. “The artist who paints the emotions,” he explained, “creates an enclosed world–the picture–which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him” (quoted in ibid., p. 9). The year that he and Marthe finally married, in 1925, he painted her no fewer than ten times in the wood-paneled dining room, with its ornate fireplace and free-standing buffet. In the present example, a second plate is partially visible in the bottom right corner of the canvas–perhaps Bonnard’s own, a spare and eloquent testament to the domestic intimacy that the couple increasingly shared.
Although Le déjeuner depicts a humble, quotidian meal, the pervasive atmosphere is one of gentle reverie–of existence fleetingly registered on the boundary between reality and dreams. Marthe wears a boldly patterned, jewel-toned jacket with bands of complementary orange and blue that seem to be woven into the very architecture of the room, with its network of horizontals and verticals. Although her sloping shoulders occupy three-quarters of the width of the canvas, her body registers to the viewer within the warp and weft of the image only after a slight, almost imperceptible delay. Her face, in contrast, stands out round and luminously pale against the background, mirroring the plate of eggs. “This dreaming feminine presence, Marthe,” Sasha Newman has written, “is central to the underlying air of mystery, of hidden sadness in much of Bonnard’s art” (Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 146).
At Vernonnet, and later at Le Cannet, Bonnard searched in almost all his waking moments for the shock of an image, for its potential to become a painting. He made notes in his journal of color patterns or fleeting observations that sparked his impulse to begin a canvas and then painted from memory back in his studio, so as not to lose sight of his initial idea. The subject of Le déjeuner, then, is not so much Marthe at breakfast as it is Bonnard’s remembrance of the visual experience, re-composed and transformed through layers of brilliant color. “When in 1931 Bonnard defined painting as un arrêt du temps (‘a stilling of time’),” Timothy Hyman has concluded, “he implied a view of time very different from Impressionist instantaneity–from Monet’s serial moments of light. Bonnard could not go, like Monet, in search of his motif; the moment had already flowered, involuntary and unsought” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 93).