La Grange

La Grange (The Barn) connects Bonnard to the rural subjects he developed at Grand-Lemps, the family property in the Isère that he visited regularly from the 1890s through the 1920s. His farm and countryside subjects from the Dauphiné have a lower chromatic temperature and more melancholy atmosphere than his later Mediterranean work—the grey-green light of interior France contrasting with the hot clarity of Provence. Barns and farm outbuildings appear throughout his early and middle landscape work as compositional anchors—solid geometric forms within or against which more fugitive elements of sky, vegetation, and light play. The subject places him in dialogue with Corot and Millet, whose rural France he was reworking through Post-Impressionist color.

The barn's architectural solidity provides a stable geometric core against which looser, more atmospheric elements of sky and vegetation are played. Bonnard renders masonry or wooden structure in warm ochres and greys, often using the building's cast shadow to establish a strong dark zone that anchors the composition. Vegetation around the structure is handled with looser, lighter strokes.