Pierre Bonnard valuation
Nabi, then the painter of domestic light, and of his wife in the bath for thirty years.
Pierre Bonnard was born near Paris in 1867, trained for the law, and joined the Nabis in 1888 with Vuillard and Denis, making flat decorative panels and some of the finest colour lithography of the 1890s.
What a work by Pierre Bonnard is worth
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Bio
Pierre Bonnard was born near Paris in 1867, trained for the law, and joined the Nabis in 1888 with Vuillard and Denis, making flat decorative panels and some of the finest colour lithography of the 1890s. From about 1900 he moved towards the subject that occupied the rest of his life: interiors, tables laid for lunch, gardens seen through windows, and Marthe, his companion of nearly fifty years, in the bath. He painted from memory and small notebook sketches rather than from the motif, and worked on unstretched canvas pinned to the wall, cutting the picture to size only when it was finished. He died at Le Cannet in 1947.
Because he painted on unstretched canvas and trimmed afterwards, edges are often irregular and a later stretcher or a lined canvas is common — that is a normal part of the history rather than a defect, but it needs to be understood. The estate settlement was long and contested and provenance for works dispersed in the 1950s can be complicated. Bonnard's prints, particularly the Vollard-published lithographs and the Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris album, are catalogued by Bouvet and are a substantial market in themselves.
At a glance
- Born
- 3 October 1867, Fontenay-aux-Roses
- Died
- 23 January 1947, Le Cannet
- Movement
- Les Nabis
More on Wikipedia.
Dauberville, Le Cannet and Tate
The paintings are catalogued by Jean and Henry Dauberville, whose four volumes appeared between 1965 and 1974 and have been followed by supplements, and the Dauberville number is the usual reference for an oil. The watercolours, gouaches and drawings have a separate Dauberville catalogue.
The Musée Bonnard at Le Cannet, the first museum devoted to him, opened in 2011 in a restored Belle Époque hotel in the town where he spent his last years. Tate Modern's The Colour of Memory in 2019 was the first major exhibition of his work in Britain for twenty years.
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