Red Plums

Painted in 1892 at the National Gallery of Art, this early still life places Bonnard in the Nabi moment but already shows his distinctive interest in sensory immediacy. Red plums — intensely coloured, tactile summer fruit — offered a subject as much about direct colour sensation as about formal still life convention. The Nabi group, influenced by Gauguin's insistence on colour liberated from naturalistic description, found fruit and domestic objects useful subjects for chromatic experiment. Bonnard's 1892 still lifes are early evidence of the colour intelligence that would drive his work for the next five decades.

Deep crimson and purple-red plums are rendered with a directness that pushes colour forward as sensation. The handling is somewhat broader than Vuillard's contemporary works, the fruit placed against a simply rendered ground that does not compete with their chromatic force.