The Terrace

Painted in 1918, this terrace scene at the Phillips Collection reveals Bonnard working in the immediate post-war period, when his domestic subjects took on a particular quality of interior warmth as a counterpoint to the historical devastation he had witnessed from his domestic retreats. The terrace — a threshold between enclosed domestic space and the open exterior — was one of his favoured compositional devices: the terrace railing or parapet creates a visual boundary that separates the sheltered domestic world from the exposed exterior, and Bonnard's chromatic treatment emphasizes this contrast. His high-keyed palette — acid yellows, vibrant purples, brilliant oranges — was by 1918 fully developed, and even a relatively modest subject like a garden terrace could sustain a chromatic composition of considerable ambition. The Phillips Collection's holding of this work, alongside numerous other key Bonnard canvases, represents Duncan Phillips's prescient recognition that what some critics dismissed as pleasant domesticity was in fact a radical chromatic achievement.

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.