[View from Uhlenhorst Ferry House on the Outer Alster Lake with St. Johannis]

This 1913 canvas attributed to Bonnard — depicting the Uhlenhorst ferry house on Hamburg's Outer Alster Lake with Saint Johannis church in the background — represents an unusual northern German subject in his predominantly French oeuvre. In 1913 Bonnard was traveling and exhibiting internationally, and German collectors and institutions had become important to his critical standing in the decade before the First World War severed cultural ties between France and Germany. The Alster Lake, Hamburg's large ornamental lake at the center of the city, would have interested Bonnard for the same reasons that attracted him to the Seine and the Mediterranean harbours: water as a reflective surface creating the kind of luminous, colour-rich environment his chromatic approach was designed to capture. The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh acquired the work as part of its systematic engagement with French Post-Impressionist painting during the early twentieth century, reflecting the American institutions' growing recognition that Bonnard's intimist subjects had a formal ambition that matched or exceeded the more conventionally celebrated Cubist developments happening simultaneously in Paris.

The northern lake light gives this canvas a cooler tonality than Bonnard's Mediterranean work, yet his characteristic broken color technique transforms the grey Hamburg sky and water into a shimmering color field. The church spire provides a vertical anchor within the horizontal lake composition. His mosaic brushwork unifies figure, water, and architecture.