Pierre BONNARD (Fontenay aux Roses 1867 - Le Cannet 1947)

The Château de Virieu near Le Grand-Lemps, ca. 1886 Oil on canvas mounted on parquet panel 38 x 40 cm Provenance: Terrasse-Floury Collection Terrasse-Floury Collection Still in the family through inheritance Bibliography : Guy-Patrice and Floriane Dauberville, Bonnard 2e Supplément Catalogue raisonné de l'Œuvre peint, Paris, Editions Bernheim-Jeune, 2021 page 71, number 02190, reproduced These are the intimate works that Pierre Bonnard offers us to contemplate from his family home in Le Grand-Lemps, and which we are honored to present for sale. Boasting some ten hectares of wooded land and a vast garden, "Le Clos" nestles at the foot of the Alps in the ancient Dauphiné region. It was here that, as a child, Pierre Bonnard spent his vacations, in the home that had belonged to his paternal grandfather, a farmer and seed grower. The painter stayed here regularly in the spring, from the beginning of his career until the property was sold in 1928. Timothy Hyman describes it as one of the "constants of his existence, from his earliest childhood to the eve of his sixtieth birthday" (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 70), and over the years it has become a major recurring motif in Pierre Bonnard's work. It was in the summer of 1895, moreover, that Pierre Bonnard, then at Le Grand Lemps, finally felt complete in his identity as a painter, declaring: "One fine day, all the phrases and theories on which our conversations had been based - color, harmony, the relationship between line and tone, balance - seemed to have lost their abstract charge and become concrete. Suddenly, I understood what I was looking for and how I was going to get there" (Timothy Hyman, Bonnard, London, 1998, p.35). In the years following this revelation, Bonnard painted several of his most remarkable canvases at Le Clos, gradually turning his attention to the surrounding Dauphiné countryside. What these canvases have in common, however, is that they reveal landscapes where nature is king, sublimated, and where happy memories of Le Clos pervade every element of the compositions. For Bonnard, these paintings represent a haven of peace, a timeless place untouched by the constant mutations of modernity. These particularly intimate works invite us, the viewer, into the story of the man and artist Pierre Bonnard, and are being offered for the first time at auction. Always family heirlooms, these three paintings of Grand Lemps and the Dauphiné are part of the Terrasse-Floury estate, since Andrée Théodorine, Pierre Bonnard's sister, was married to Claude Terrasse, great-grandfather of the current owners.