La famille Claude Terrace

La famille Claude Terrasse from 1909, now at Villa Flora in Winterthur, documents Bonnard's brother-in-law's family — Claude Terrasse was a musician who had married Bonnard's sister Andrée — in a garden or terrace setting. The Terrasse family at their Fontainebleau property had been one of Bonnard's most important early subject sources, providing the children, domestic animals, and family meals that constituted his intimist subject matter in the 1890s. By 1909 the Terrasse children had grown, and the family subjects of this period have a different quality from the earlier scenes — the children are older, the compositions more formally organised. Villa Flora in Winterthur was the home of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, exceptional Swiss collectors who assembled one of the finest concentrations of Post-Impressionist painting in Europe, with particularly outstanding groups of Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse acquired directly from the artists. Their collecting practice — building personal relationships with the artists rather than purchasing through dealers — gave their collection an unusual intimacy and completeness.

Bonnard's canvases vibrate with color built from small, variegated strokes applied in a high-keyed palette of cadmium yellows, deep purples, vermilion, and turquoise. He often composed from memory, distorting perspective and scale for emotional rather than descriptive accuracy.