House on the Seine near Vernon

Painted in 1916 and held at the Metropolitan Museum, this view of a house on the Seine near Vernon belongs to Bonnard's sustained exploration of the Norman landscape around Vernonnet during his years at the Le Grand Lemps house. The Seine valley near Vernon — near Monet's Giverny — offered lush, water-reflected light familiar from Impressionist tradition, but Bonnard inflected this familiar subject with a more purely chromatic ambition. The house reflected in or glimpsed near the river connects domestic architecture to landscape in a characteristically Bonnard composition, the human-made and natural environments merging in a unified colour field.

Water reflection and house architecture create a symmetrical division of the composition. The palette of greens, blues, and warm ochres captures the soft Norman light. Reflections are rendered as active colour zones rather than precise mirrors.