PIERRE BONNARD

ART

In 1897 Ambroise Vollard published the first of many albums of Bonnard’s lithographs and illustrated books. The lithographs below, illustrating Longus’s “Daphnis et Chloé”, were his second commission for Bonnard. In the prologue Longus writes that he wished to make ‘…an offering to Love and the Nymphs and Pan, and a source of pleasure for the human race—something to heal the sick and comfort the afflicted, to refresh the memory of those who have been in love and educate those who have not.’

Bonnard likened the story of the love affair between Daphnis and Chloé who were both abandoned by their original parents and brought up by country folk in the Greek countryside, to his own history and surroundings. Their education in love is drawn out over a long and continuing enjoyable romp of near misses, with the seasons playing a major role in the lives of the young lovers. The cast includes such diverse characters as pirates and lords, pan and a loose woman, a rival and nymphs. Bonnard said of the commission “On every page I evoke the shepherd of Lesbos with a sort of frenzied happiness that carried me along in spite of myself”.

As Nicholas Watkins says in his 1994 Phaidon book on the artist when discussing Bonnard’s change of setting for the pastoral idle;

“But there is a clear distinction to be made between Bonnard’s uses of the two settings. Whereas his photographs of the Terrasse children playing in the garden at Le Clos, in combination with his own childhood memories, provided the source for such scenes of unaffected innocence as the young Daphnis wandering about naked with bunches of wildflowers in each hand, or sitting by a fountain, he employed the landscape of Ile-de-France for something much more immediately erotic. He and Marthe abandoned the bed in the Paris apartment for the garden of the house at Montval, where they stripped naked and photographed each other in the roles of Daphnis and Chloe…To register his tenuous grasp of this fleeting reality, as well as the delicacy and essential vulnerability of the lover’s predicament, Bonnard employed and Impressionist, sketch-like technique, for which he was criticized, rather than a firm, classical style of crisp linear contours. The tremulous nature of the sketch-like style was peculiarly effective in scenes where Daphnis and Chloe feel their fingers pulsate at the touch of each other’s bodies.” Bonnard, Phaidon 1994, by Nicholas Watkins.

As well as following the text for inspiration, Bonnard has recalled the peasants of the Ile-de-France and of Marly and Montval, where he had bought a small house that turns up in many of the lithographs. He also includes the peasants from his native Dauphine. Rather than being inspired by his paintings in these images he continually used the characters in these images in his canvases of this period.

The lithographs were printed at the Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, by the famous Auguste Clot in 1902 and published by Ambroise Vollard, the  great Parisian art dealer of the early 20th century who gave Cezanne, Picasso, and Maillol their first one-man exhibitions.

The series are printed on Van Gelden Holland wove paper bearing the watermark Daphnis et Chloé. The original stones have been cancelled. All are approximately 15 x 16 cm and priced at $1050

‘The lithographs, of an unprecedented lightness of touch, have been printed with such subtlety and skill that you seem to see the original crayon, and they, like the text, have that marvellous spontaneity that will remain forever one of Bonnard’s greatest gifts.’  (Jacques Guignard, Le Livre, Editions du Chêne, 1942)