The Riviera

Painted in 1923 and held at the Phillips Collection, this panoramic subject connects Bonnard's landscape practice to the broad chromatic ambition of his most productive decade. By the early 1920s Bonnard was deeply familiar with the Mediterranean coast; the Riviera's intense light, rich vegetation, and chromatic abundance provided the complement to the cooler Norman landscapes of Vernonnet. The Phillips Collection's sustained engagement with Bonnard — Duncan Phillips bought multiple major works — gives this landscape an important institutional home. The Riviera subject in Bonnard's hands becomes a vehicle for total immersion in saturated southern colour.

The Mediterranean landscape is rendered in intense blues, ochres, and greens. The panoramic view allows the composition to range across varied terrain — sea, hillside, vegetation — rendered in Bonnard's mature high-key palette without conventional spatial recession.