Iris et Lilas

Iris et Lilas from around 1920, at the Fondation Bemberg, belongs to Bonnard's flower paintings from the period when his chromatic ambition was at its most expansive. Iris and lilac are the great spring flowers of Provence, blooming together in late April against still-cool blue skies — their combination producing a naturally harmonious colour chord of deep purples, blues, and mauves that offered Bonnard a ready-made chromatic subject. His garden at Le Bosquet had both plants, and he cut flowers directly from it for his still-life arrangements, working with the specific colour relationships of actual blooms rather than from a conventional painter's selection of studio specimens. These combined flower subjects of the 1920s and 1930s rank among his most purely chromatic works, released from any narrative or psychological content and devoted entirely to the sensory experience of intense colour in domestic light. Contemporary French painters including Matisse were also producing ambitious flower subjects, but Bonnard's are distinctive for their atmospheric density — the flowers seem to exist within a suffused, colour-saturated air.

The deep blue-violet of iris and the lighter mauve-white of lilac create a sustained purple-blue harmony that Bonnard plays against the warm ground tone of the surrounding interior. Individual blooms are rendered in clusters of small varied strokes—no single bloom is fully described but the overall impression of each flower type is unmistakable. The vase provides a grounding geometric form beneath the exuberant floral mass.