After briefly practicing law, Pierre Bonnard turned to painting full time. Like his lifelong friend Édouard Vuillard, Bonnard began his career exploring the spiritual and symbolic potential of art, and gradually added to those concerns by focusing on the formal qualities of painting, celebrating light and color and structure above all, even subject matter. In this portrait of Leila Anet (née Schopfer), commissioned by her father, the well-known writer and collector Claude Anet, the composition is largely straightforward. Anet sits upright in her spectacularly striped armchair, her hand in her lap and her legs modestly crossed, gazing directly at the viewer. Indeed, with regard to content, the portrait is not strikingly different from its mid-nineteenth century predecessors. In style, however, Bonnard remains exclusively in the twentieth century, befitting this strikingly modern sitter. A brown shadow becomes red, a red stripe becomes yellow, each defining depth and form along the way. From the pigment of her white sweater and skirt to the jagged areas on the carpet that spill out of the recess of the fireplace—all are constructed by Bonnard’s harnessing of color and light.
Details
- Artist Name: Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947)
- Title: Portrait of Leila Claude Anet
- Date: 1930
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 49 x 32-5/8 in. (124.5 x 82.9 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1993.1.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
Robert Ellis Simon, bequest 29 October 1969 to;
The Norton Simon Foundation, F.1969.38.1.P, transferred 1993 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Cent tableaux de collections privées, de Bonnrd à de Staël
- Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 1960-04 to 1960-06
[on loan]
- Hunt Branch Library, Fullerton, 1965 to
[on loan]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970-01-02 to
Six Centuries of Portraiture from the Permanent Collection
- Norton Simon Museum, 1989-11-02 to 1990-12-16
Three Centuries of French Art: Selections from The Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art and the Norton Simon Foundation_2
- California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1974-10-19 to 1976-06-15
Gaze: Portraiture After Ingres
- Norton Simon Museum, 2009-10-30 to 2010-04-05
- Galerie d'Art Braun & Cie, Portraits de Pierre Bonnard, 1933, p. 13
- Beer, François-Joachim, Pierre Bonnard, 1947, fig. 80 p. 100
- Galerie Charpentier, Cent tableaux de collections privées, de Bonnrd à de Staël, 1960, no. 4
- Figaro, 1960, p. 16
- Dauberville, Jean; and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, 1965, no. 1458
- California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Three Centuries of French Art: Selections from the Norton Simon, Inc. Museum and the Norton Simon Foundation, 1976, no. 52 p. 119
- Gállego, Julián, Goya, 1979, fig. 39 pp. 216-217
- The French Impressionists in Southern California: Paintings, Sculptures and Prints in Public Collections. A Guide Book and Catalogue, 1984,
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum, 1989, p. 183
- Whitfield, Sarah, Bonnard, 1998,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 372 p. 290
Additional Artwork by Artist
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