The Street in Winter

The Street in Winter at the Dallas Museum of Art offers Bonnard's vision of a Paris boulevard in winter 1894, the grey season that strips the decorative pleasures of foliage and light and replaces them with the social theatre of pedestrians in heavy coats moving against cold stone. Bonnard was fascinated by the rhythmic flow of Parisian street life at all seasons, and the winter street gave him an opportunity to work in a cooler, more restricted palette than the warm garden and interior scenes he also produced during these years.

The painting deploys a cool grey-blue palette appropriate to winter light, with dark figure silhouettes providing rhythmic punctuation across the pale ground. Bonnard constructs the recession of the street through overlapping planes of tone rather than conventional perspective, maintaining a decorative surface tension characteristic of his Nabi period.