The Dining Room in the Country
This is The Dining Room in the Country by Pierre Bonnard, which was painted in 1913 in the French country side. It is the interior of his house ‘Ma Roulette’. At this time in his life Bonnard was very inspired by his wife, Maria Boursin, and painted many domestic scene’s with her in them. He was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine, France on October 3, 1867. He had a happy youth and Studied Law under the influence of his father, and practiced art on the side. After a brief stunt as a barrister, Bonnard left law and pursued his love, art at the École des Beaux-Arts. After failing to win the Rome Prize Competition in 1888, he left the school for the less formal Académie Julian. There he met Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, and Ker Xavier Roussel. They soon banned together in 1890 and formed an artistic brotherhood called ‘Les Nabis’. Bonnard was known as “the Japonizing Nabi,” for his use of flat, liner, and playful style in a kind of freehand style. While his friends at the time took on the concept, “that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors which have been arranged in a given order,” Bonnard’s visual humor and sly mocking made him stand out from the rest of the group. A good example of his paintings at this time are Woman with Rabbit (1891) and the Croquet Game (1892). In1891 Bonnard began to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants, where he met Toulouse-Lautrec, and at the galleries of Le Barc de Boutteville, a dealer who represented the Nabis as a group. Bonnard’s first one-man show was held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1896. In addition to easel paintings, Bonnard executed decorative screens, posters (France Champagne, 1889-1890; La Revue-blanche, 1894; L’Estampe et l’affiche, 1896), book illustrations (Marie by Nansen, 1897-1899; Verlaine’s Parallèlement, 1900; Daphnis and Chloe, 1902;Renard’s Histoires naturelles, 1904), lithographs (notably the set Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris,1895), sculpture, and stage sets.
After 1900, Bonnard developed a lighter palette and somewhat developed a hand closely linked to the Impressionists. While his hand became looser, he still hung on to the idea of the flat surface, and his mixture of the two styles produced a more abstract hand than the impressionist, due to his use of color blocking. After 1910, Bonnard began making frequent trips to the southern part of France where he purchased Le Cannet in 1925, the year he married his wife who had been his model and companion since 1895. Here in the country side by the sea, his paintings flourished and stayed true to their structure and exploitation of the decorative possibilities of the picture plane. Soon after his marriage he visited the United States and served as a member of the jury of the Carnegie International Competition in 1926. His late works are freer in expression and more luminous than ever. During World War II he lived in Le Cannet, and there he died on Jan. 23, 1947.
There is no real “story” behind this image more than during his time in the french country side, Bonnard enjoyed painting domestic scenes with his wife. His house ‘Ma Roulette’ is featured and the interior of the dining room is present. In this painting, Bonnard has combined animate and inanimate objects, somewhat combing a still life with a portrait and somewhat landscape. There is the table and plates on the right and his wife, a cat, and some tree on the left. To add a symbolist subjectivity to the piece, Bonnard painted not from observation, but from memory. While he may have used his memory for this painting, Bonnard did experiment with photography and Kodak film later on in his life. This painting is on canvas and is 64 ¾” X 81″. It is currently in The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota, US. The idea of painting the country side and subjects of everyday life is something true to the impressionist nature in Bonnard.
