Red Plums

Painted in 1892 and now in the National Gallery of Art, this early still life places Bonnard squarely within the Nabi moment when he and his fellow students — Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard — were transforming Gauguin's colour theories into a new doctrine of surface and form. Sérusier's famous Talisman painting of 1888, executed under Gauguin's direct instruction in the Bois d'Amour at Pont-Aven, had demonstrated that colour could be liberated from descriptive function; red plums in 1892 offered Bonnard the same opportunity. The Nabi circle shared a fundamental conviction, drawn from both Gauguin and the Japanese woodblock print tradition, that a painting's surface was an autonomous decorative field — not a window onto represented reality but a pattern of coloured forms that happened to suggest fruit, cloth, or flesh. Bonnard's early still lifes are already more sensuously physical than Denis's more programmatic work, and the colour intelligence they display would drive his development for the next fifty-five years, culminating in the intensely chromatic late works at Le Cannet.

Deep crimson and purple-red plums are rendered with a directness that pushes colour forward as sensation. The handling is somewhat broader than Vuillard's contemporary works, the fruit placed against a simply rendered ground that does not compete with their chromatic force.