The Seine at Vernon

Painted in 1947 and held at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, this is one of Bonnard's very last paintings — completed in the year of his death in January. The Seine at Vernon revisits a subject he had explored across four decades, from his earliest Vernonnet years through his final months. A dying painter returning to a long-familiar river subject: the Thyssen work is a testament to the sustained visual attention Bonnard brought to the same motifs across a lifetime of painting. The late colour — intense, radiant, pushed to the chromatic edge — makes no concessions to failing health or the devastations of the occupation years.

The late palette is at maximum intensity: the Seine rendered in brilliant blues and turquoises, the banks in saturated greens and ochres. Spatial recession is partially abandoned in favour of chromatic density. The brushwork retains energy and conviction despite the painter's age and health.