Boy Eating Cherries

Boy Eating Cherries belongs to a small group of Bonnard's works featuring children as subjects, a category that received less systematic attention in his oeuvre than his domestic female subjects but produced some warmly observed paintings. Children in the act of eating fruit—an intensely sensory activity—suited his interest in direct, unmediated physical experience as a visual subject. The cherries reappear throughout his work as chromatic events and as subjects of pure sensory pleasure, and observing a child eating them directly and messily was a natural extension of this. The work probably dates from one of his visits to Grand-Lemps, where family gatherings included children.

The child's face in close proximity to bright red cherries creates a strong compositional focus on the contrast between warm flesh tones and the saturated cherry reds. Bonnard renders the child's features with a lightness of touch that distinguishes this from formal portraiture. The cherries themselves are painted with the chromatic intensity he gave them in still lifes—individual fruits differentiated by tone and highlight.