Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard was a French artist, born in 1867 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Ile-de-France. He died in 1947 in Le Cannet, Cannes. Bonnard is considered one of France's most significant artists of the 20th century, and was a painter and graphic artist.

He stands foremost among artists because of his pure and fully developed painterly values, despite the fact that he did not intervene directly in the development of art as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso did. Bonnard's paintings are characterized by a harmony in the earlier nude studies and tranquility in his later garden interiors, which are sunny and beautiful. He was a rare talent as a colourist, and his colors were often used ornamentally. The color is blonde and put together in a refined way. Bonnard was educated at the Académie Jullian, where he became acquainted with Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and Edouard Vuillard. He also belonged to the Gauguin-influenced Nabis group. His early pictures were characterized by the characteristic technique of the Nabis group, which included partitions and an emphasis on solid contour and surface.

Bonnard was also interested in decorative arts in the 1890s, making drawings for furniture, screen boards, books and posters. At the beginning of the 20th century, he painted a series of sterns, which were not always anatomically accurate, but were coloristically superior. He gradually became freer in his brushwork and colouring, and created a wide range of flower pictures, garden interiors, still lifes and scenes. Bonnard also painted pure fantasy landscapes where natural forms were dissolved in favor of luminous color visions. He was also an outstanding graphic artist and created, among other things, the color lithograph series Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (1895), book illustrations in lithography, etching and woodcut, including Peter Nansen's Maria, André Gide's Prometheus, Paul Verlaine's Parallèlement and Octave Mirbeau's Dingo.