The Seine at Vernonnet

Painted in 1930 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, this view of the Seine at Vernonnet is from Bonnard's final years at the property he had rented since 1912. By 1930 he was spending increasingly long periods at Le Cannet, and the Vernonnet works of this period have a particular valedictory quality — familiar views rendered with mature confidence and perhaps with awareness that the property's days as his northern base were numbered. The Seine at Vernonnet across seasons and light conditions was one of his most sustained single subjects, and the Art Institute's holding represents a late, chromatically ambitious example of this series.

The Seine's water surface is rendered with Bonnard's mature chromatic intensity — greens, blues, and the warm reflected light of the Norman sky. The river banks with their lush vegetation provide varied greens. The composition is broadly horizontal, the river surface as a chromatic field.