Le Concert Lamoureux

Le Concert Lamoureux records Bonnard's attendance at the famous Sunday afternoon orchestral concerts organized by Charles Lamoureux, which were a central institution of Parisian musical life from the 1880s onward. The Concerts Lamoureux promoted Wagner and the French symphonists to a broad middle-class audience, and attending them was both a musical and social ritual for educated Parisians of Bonnard's circle. His music subjects connect him to the Nabi interest in cross-disciplinary artistic correspondence—music as the art form closest to pure formal expression, closest to what painting could aspire to when freed from narrative. Bonnard and Vuillard attended concerts together regularly in the 1890s and early 1900s.

The concert hall interior is rendered in warm tones of gold and amber—the glow of chandeliers over a packed audience. Individual figures in the stalls and galleries are loosely indicated, merging into the textured mass of an audience rather than being individually characterized. The orchestra and performers may be glimpsed at the far end of the composition, distant and almost abstract. Bonnard's handling of the interior atmosphere is atmospheric rather than architecturally precise.