The Seine at Vernonnet

Painted in 1930 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this view of the Seine at Vernonnet belongs to the final years of Bonnard's long association with the property he had rented since 1912. By 1930 he was spending increasingly extended periods at Le Cannet, and the Vernonnet works of the late period carry a particular chromatic authority — the Seine valley subjects had been worked for nearly two decades and Bonnard knew exactly how to convey their specific quality of northern light and river reflection. The river subject occupies a distinctive place within his landscape practice: unlike the enclosed garden or the bounded domestic interior, the river's movement and reflective surface created a subject in constant flux, requiring an approach that captured impression rather than fact. Bonnard's method of working from memory and preliminary drawings — rather than before the motif — suited the river subject particularly well, allowing him to concentrate the accumulated sensation of many observations into a single resolved chromatic statement. The Art Institute's late Vernonnet canvas represents a significant acquisition for its comprehensive Franco-American modernist holdings.

The Seine's water surface is rendered with Bonnard's mature chromatic intensity — greens, blues, and the warm reflected light of the Norman sky. The river banks with their lush vegetation provide varied greens. The composition is broadly horizontal, the river surface as a chromatic field.