Bonnard can safely be ranked among the best landscape painters of the XX century. From early youth, he subtly felt nature, believing it to be “the best cure for city fuss.”
A beautiful, but unattainable dream of harmonious merging of man with nature was embodied in several early works of the artist. So, in the painting “Terrace”, in 1918 he wrote a married couple, “dissolved” in a luxuriant garden. This work is difficult to consider a landscape in the strict sense of the word.
In addition to nature itself and people, there are some parts of the home interior. But these details do not distract the viewer from the beauty of the surrounding world. The crowns of trees, clouds, distant fields are written with “false” colors, but for some reason it all seems far more real than the most accurate color photo. Bonnard’s later landscapes, painted by him from the window of his studio, amaze with a riot of bright colors and cheerfulness. Trees, sun, air burst into the artist’s window.
The spectator feels that this holiday of nature is closely on the canvas. Look at the fire of mimosa in the window in the painting “The Artist’s and the Mimosa’s Workshop”, 1939-46. “I became a landscape painter not because I paint landscapes, in fact, I do not often do it,” wrote Bonnard Matisse, “it’s just that nature helps me get rid of everything that poisons me.” Landscapes Bonnard and in fact heal the soul.
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