Vue du Cannet

Vue du Cannet is one of many bird's-eye views Bonnard painted from his villa Le Bosquet, looking down over the cascading rooftiles, garden terraces, and palm trees of the town toward the glittering stripe of the Mediterranean in the far distance. He made such views repeatedly from the late 1920s onward, treating the specific topography of Le Cannet as a kind of visual laboratory for his experiments with color and spatial organization. The high viewpoint disrupts conventional recession and allows Bonnard to treat the entire picture surface as an interlocking field of color patches. Dealers and critics of the 1930s saw these works as among his most radical departures from Impressionist precedent, though Bonnard himself insisted he was simply recording what he saw.

The picture surface is organized as a dense mosaic of color patches with no single dominant focal point. Reds, oranges, and acid yellows jostle with passages of deep violet shadow, the whole held together by Bonnard's habitual warm ground tone showing through in places. Depth is indicated by the lightening of hues toward the horizon rather than by perspective convergence.