[View from Uhlenhorst Ferry House on the Outer Alster Lake with St. Johannis]

This 1913 canvas attributed to Bonnard — showing the Uhlenhorst ferry house on the Outer Alster Lake in Hamburg with Saint Johannis church in the background — represents an unusual northern German subject in his predominantly French oeuvre. In 1913 Bonnard was traveling and exhibiting internationally, and German collectors and institutions had become important to his reputation. The Alster Lake, Hamburg's large urban lake, would have appealed to his lifelong interest in water and reflections as pictorial subjects. The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh holds the work as part of its collection of French Post-Impressionist painting.

The northern lake light gives this canvas a cooler tonality than Bonnard's Mediterranean work, yet his characteristic broken color technique transforms the grey Hamburg sky and water into a shimmering color field. The church spire provides a vertical anchor within the horizontal lake composition. His mosaic brushwork unifies figure, water, and architecture.