Dining Room on the Garden

Painted in 1923 and held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, this dining room overlooking a garden is a major statement of Bonnard's central compositional theme: the interior opening to the exterior through window or door. By 1923 Bonnard was spending significant time in the South of France as well as at Vernonnet, and the dining room scenes of this period have a particular chromatic richness — the garden visible through the opening provides the luminous foil against which the warm domestic interior is measured. The Guggenheim's holdings of early twentieth-century European modernism make this an important institutional context for the work.

The architectural opening to the garden divides the composition between interior warm tones and the more brilliant exterior light. Table and domestic objects in the foreground are rendered with warm, varied colour. The brushwork is mature and free, building the chromatic environment through accumulated varied marks.