Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1927)
Dudensing Collection, Paris & New York (acquired from the above)
Laughlin Phillips, Washington, D.C.
Thence by descent

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art & Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Entering the Twentieth Century: Oil, Watercolors and Drawings, 1932-33

Jean & Henry Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, vol. III, Paris, 1973, no. 1367, illustrated p. 298

The canvas is not lined and there do not appear to be any signs of retouching visible under UV light. Some very fine lines of stable craquelure in places to the sky. The canvas is very gently undulating. This work is in overall very good condition.
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Through his involvement with the Nabis at the beginning of the century, Bonnard had grown accustomed to using decorative stylistic elements in his paintings, such as flattened patches of color and bold contours, which are resonant of Japanese culture and art. By this point in his artistic career, Bonnard was often referred to as le Nabi Japonard. His fascination with the art of the east was in part stimulated by an exhibition of Japanese art held at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1890. Upon viewing this exhibition, Bonnard was intrigued by the fundamental simplicity of Japanese woodblock prints and bold use of color in large, unmodulated patches. By the time he painted the present work, the artist had developed a mature and singular style influenced strongly by those elements that had intrigued him at the École des Beaux-Arts exhibition and informed by the strong influence that Gauguin had over the Nabis. As Sarah Whitfield writes, Bonnard "makes us aware that the principal subject for the painter must be the surface which, as he says, 'has its colour, its laws over and above those of objects’" (Sarah Whitfield & John Elderfield, Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), London, Tate Gallery, 1998. p. 15).

In this depiction of the southern French landscape, his use of this technique was extraordinarily effective in conveying the variations in the terrain. He uses interlacing patches of color to form the rushing water and the expanse of lush greens in the distance. As a landscape painter, Bonnard was always fascinated by light and color, and in the present work he beautifully renders the unique quality of light. Strongly taken by the luminosity and the atmosphere that engulfs the South of France, Bonnard explored the infinite variations of light, experimented with varying perspectives and the progressive changes of volumes and contours. As James Elliott observed, “Bonnard was essentially a colorist. He devoted his main creative energies to wedding his sensations of color from nature to those from paint itself—sensations which he said thrilled and even bewildered him. Perceiving color with a highly developed sensitivity, he discovered new and unfamiliar effects from which he selected carefully, yet broadly and audaciously... Whether in narrow range or multitudinous variety, the colors move across the surface of his paintings in constantly shifting interplay, lending an extraordinary fascination to common subject Familiar sights—the pervading greenness of a landscape, the intensification of color in objects on a lightly overcast day—are given vivid life” (James Elliott in Bonnard and His Environment (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964, p. 25).