Grapes

Painted in 1928 and held at MoMA, this still life of grapes belongs to Bonnard's mature phase when he was regularly between Le Cannet and Vernonnet. Grapes — the fruit most associated with southern France and with the Cézanne still life tradition — were a natural subject for Bonnard's sustained meditation on fruit as chromatic subject. The 1928 date places the work in a highly productive period when Bonnard was refining his approach to still life: the table as a field for chromatic relationships between objects, surfaces, and light. His still lifes of this period are in conscious dialogue with Cézanne's table compositions while pushing colour beyond Cézanne's tonal restraint.

Clusters of grapes in deep purple-black and pale green-gold are arranged on a surface with characteristic Bonnard spatial ambiguity. The table recedes at an impossibly steep angle, pushing objects toward the picture plane. Colour relationships are the primary structural tool.