Oranges

Oranges belongs to Bonnard's southern still-life series, the orange being the quintessential Mediterranean fruit whose saturated warm color connected his still-life practice to the landscape of Le Cannet where orange and lemon trees grew in domestic gardens. He painted oranges repeatedly in the 1930s and 1940s, sometimes singly on a table, sometimes in baskets or bowls, sometimes combined with other fruits or domestic objects. The orange's specific orange-red hue was among the most chromically powerful single-fruit subjects available to him, capable of generating an entire composition's color key through its relationship with the complementary blues and blue-greens of tablecloths or interior walls.

The orange's warm, round, reflective surface gives Bonnard ample material for close chromatic observation. He renders each orange through a range of orange tones from yellow-orange on the lit surfaces to deeper red-orange in the shadow areas, with a specific quality of diffuse reflected light characteristic of citrus skin. The surrounding still-life elements are calibrated in relation to the dominant orange tone.