The Palm

The Palm tree became one of Bonnard's most recurring Le Cannet motifs—the tall, fanlike Mediterranean palm visible from his garden terrace served as both a framing device and a subject in its own right in dozens of works from the 1920s and 1930s. The palm's distinctive silhouette, which reads simultaneously as a flat decorative form and a three-dimensional object, suited his interest in the tension between surface pattern and spatial suggestion. It also indexed his deep identification with the Mediterranean south, which he had come to prefer over Paris or the Dauphiné. These palm-centered compositions were sometimes criticized by contemporaries as too decorative, lacking the psychological weight of his interiors, but Bonnard regarded them as among his most purely pleasurable works.

The palm's fronds are rendered in a range of greens from acid yellow-green to deep blue-green, built up through overlapping strokes of varied direction that animate the surface. The sky behind is typically a saturated blue or pale turquoise. Bonnard often places the trunk at or near the left or right edge of the canvas, using it as a vertical anchor for an otherwise horizontally organized landscape composition.