L'Omnibus

L'Omnibus belongs to Bonnard's early engagement with the Parisian street scene as a modernist subject—the horse-drawn omnibus was the dominant form of public transport in Paris in the 1890s before the motorbus and Métro transformed the city. Toulouse-Lautrec's posters and prints had established the omnibus as a visual shorthand for Parisian modernity, and Bonnard's intimist version focused on the compressed interior space of the vehicle and its mix of passengers rather than the spectacle of the street outside. His treatment owes something to his own poster and lithographic work of the early 1890s, when he was designing for the Revue Blanche and developing a flat, graphic approach to urban subjects.

The omnibus interior creates a tunnel-like compressed space where figures are packed together with the same integration of person and setting that characterizes his interior paintings. The palette for urban transport subjects tends toward cooler, slightly grey tones appropriate to the enclosed, artificial-light environment. Figures are schematically rendered, their individual identities less important than their collective presence as passengers in transit.