Montmartre

Montmartre as a subject places Bonnard within the most mythologized neighborhood of the Paris art world—the butte on the Right Bank that housed studios, cabarets, and the social life of the avant-garde from the 1880s through the 1910s. He lived and worked in Montmartre during his formative years in Paris, sharing the neighborhood with Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, and later Picasso. His Montmartre paintings from the 1890s and 1900s capture the specific visual character of the neighborhood—its steep streets, outdoor cafés, the Sacré-Cœur rising above, and the mixture of bohemian artists and working-class locals. Unlike the touristic Montmartre of picture postcards, Bonnard's version is observed from the inside.

The steep streets and irregular topography of Montmartre provide strong diagonal and vertical compositional elements. Bonnard renders the neighborhood's characteristic grey stone and plaster in cool tones against warmer patches of window light and sky. The overall palette tends toward the silvery greys and blue-greens of the northern urban light, distinct from the warm Mediterranean tones of his Le Cannet work.