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Property from a Private American Collection On November 1st, as part of our Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York, Christie's is privileged to offer this superb group of paintings and sculpture from a private American collection. Brilliantly chosen in the course of just a few years, from the late 1960's to the early 1970's, these works of art, each exceptional in its own right, also form part of an unusually harmonious ensemble. The wonderful "trio" of classic early Impressionist paintings, for example--Monet's 1869-1870 Louveciennes street scene, Pissarro's 1873 harvest landscape near Pontoise, and Sisley's 1875 view of the Seine at Port-Marly--were hung together in the house in a way that no visitor could ever forget. Seen individually, each work represents the finest achievement of the artist in that year. Monet's Route à Louveciennes, effet de neige, painted in the winter of 1869-1870, when the artist was visiting Pissaro--his house can be seen to the left of the dead straight route de Versailles, a blush of pale yellow and gray-violet--is a miracle of tonal balance, in which Monet embraces the special difficulties of dipicting winter coloring and snow melt with his own unique visual relish. Pissarro's Paysage, la moisson, Pontoise of 1873--an annus mirabilis for the artist, as was 1872--was part of the first series of views he painted in or near Pontoise, following this move there in 1872. It is one of his greatest and most beautiful early landscapes, in which he captures the dry heat of full summer, in contrast to Monet's winter subtleties. Reminiscent of Corot's early Italian landscapes, as Richard Brettell has pointed out, this sophisticated composition is all at once a glorious and potent encapsulation of rural France by an artist at the height of his powers. The third work in the "trio," Sisley's Bords de Seine à Port-Marly of 1875, looks across the river Seine, from a vantage point at water level, to a cluster of farm buildings on the Ile de la Loge. A sand-laden skiff anchors this tranquil rural scene, which, as so often in his finest early works, is quickened by Sisley's mastery of water-borne reflection. Another important Monet landscape of circa 1876, Les rosiers dans le jardin de Montgeron, which bursts with flowering roses, and which was painted on commission for Ernest Hoschedé's country house, and a Degas bronze, La danse espagnole, round out the Impressionist section of the collection. Post-Impressionism is brilliantly represented by a single, extraordinary masterpiece: Toulouse-Lautrec's La blanchisseuse of circa 1886-1887, a work almost shocking in its visual and psychological power. The artist had used Carmen Gaudin, with her striking red hair, as his model on a number of previous occasions, but white triangles of her clothing and the artist's compassion for the life of this young laundress break entirely new ground. There is nothing sentimental as she muses, her eyes hidden from us, in a weary pause from her drudgery: we see just the perfect painterly and emotional balance of a great work of art. By contrast to Impressionist landscape and Post-Impressionist portraiture, still life is the theme of the 20th century works in the collection, in particular two masterworks by Bonnard and Matisse. The latter had wintered for the first time in Nice in 1917-1918 and then again in 1918-1919. When he came north to Issy-les-Moulineaux, where his monumental Les marguerites was painted in the summer of 1919, his new work was infused with the exuberant light and color of the south. Matisse here set a brilliant bouquet from his garden at Issy against an intricate, ornamental background, characteristic of his studio in Nice, which created a new sense of decorative complexity and planar depth in his work, just as he was embarking on a new and liberated phase of his career. Bonnard's superb still life on a tabletop, Compotiers et assiettes de fruits, of circa 1930-1932, tilts towards us to offer up its gorgeous array of fruit. Vibrant reds, yellows and oranges, blues and blacks glow in the background and shimmer on the white tablecloth. The artist's uncanny feel for balanced composition and color--a sort of visual "perfect pitch"--is wittily braced along the lower edge of this scintillating painting by the interplay between cat and dachshund. Fine still lifes by Braque, Vuillard and Miró, a Bonnard landscape and a Van Dongen street scene are also included in the sale on November 1st. I am honored to be involved in the sale of these wonderful works of art; and I was particularly fortunate to have seen the collection in situ many times, from the mid-1970s on, and to have enjoyed the company and hospitality of the forthright, funny, often blunt and always charming man who had the wit and the eye to put together one of the finest collections of its kind in the United States. Christoper Burge Honorary Chairman A New Impressionist Triptych Why would anyone want to make an Impressionist triptych? The word "triptych" itself is redolent of religion, and one immediately thinks of a central devotional image flanked by two saints or two donors or one of each. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley would never have imagined that anyone would create a triptych of their paintings. Yet, that is precisely what occurred early in the 20th century when Ernest May created a gorgeous triptych, now famous, because he gave it to the French nation encadré en triptyche (framed as a triptych) to form what remains one of the enduring monuments of Impressionist landscape painting. For May, who was a sophisticated collector of Impressionism, the high point of the movement was the year 1872, when each of the three painters enshrined in his triptych made scores of paintings of a uniform quality almost unknown in the remainder of their illustrious careers. Yet, May's triptych, seen by millions--indeed hundreds of millions--of visitors since it first entered the Jeu de Paume, before being transferred to the Musée d'Orsay, has become a touchstone of consistency in Impressionist landscape painting that has not been superseded. What does May's triptych teach us about Impressionism and about France in 1872? First, we see the work of three painters who had spent the large part of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune in exile in England. While Renoir fought, while Bazille died, while Manet and Degas suffered in Paris during the siege, Pissarro, Monet, and Sisley fled to England for reasons unique to each individual artist. While in that country, they consolidated the strides they had made in the late 1860's and worked to study the major paintings by Constable, Turner, and other British landscape painters previously known to them more by name than through example. Their "time away" gave each a combustible combination of objectivity and guilt that created the conditions for great art. Once Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley returned to France in 1872, each made landscapes of la belle France with both devotion and confidence. For each, the horizons were low, the skies limpid, the villages untouched by war, the fields perennially tilled, the trains on time, the peasants working, and the pleasure boats floating on the Seine. Their France endured, in spite of the Prussians, and the paintings they created appealed instantly to collectors, most of whom snapped up these generous fictions--all based on visual fact--to give the three artists a real, if illusory, financial success. 1872 and 1873 were very good years for Impressionism, and Mr. May formed a triptych of paintings from the earlier of these years, which collectively presents an image of a France without damage, reparations, or memories of war. This is Impressionism as a healing art for a wounded nation. Pissarro's road into the village of Voisin seemed, for all the world, like Hobbema's Avenue at Middelharnes, which he had seen at the National Gallery in London--balanced, clear, and controlled. Monet's pleasure boats await their sailor-owners on a fine summer day, and their sails will soon be unfurled as they are prepared to race in a regatta on the wide waters of the Seine near Argenteuil. And Sisley's watery landscape is also at once calm and immediate, as if the soldiers from Prussia had never set foot in the Ile-de-France. If ever a triptych was reassuring and calm, it was this one--religious, in a way, without God or gods. For May, the triptych was something so radically unified that it succeeded in becoming something not about the three artists who contributed to its unity, but rather about the conditions of modern France itself. France survived without apparent harm in paintings of an almost sublime calm and confidence. For me, as a beginning expert on Impressionist landscape painting and as a student of the Ile-de-France, I came to think of the May Triptych as an exemplar of French strength and as a measuring stick of that same nation's insecurities. What I never suspected is that I would find a larger and, in certain ways, more ambitious triptych on a visit to a private collector. On a single dining room wall in a house I first visited on a museum trip in 1980, I saw a triptych of three paintings by the same three artists enshrined by May, but a triptych that was more complex than Ernest May's famous first attempt. When I mentioned the May triptych to the owner, he smiled broadly, realizing that I had "gotten" his aim in buying three landscape paintings by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, each of which was larger and all of which were collectively more important than the May triptych. For May, it was important that each of the three canvases had virtually identical dimensions. The owner of the second triptych had no such concern. Indeed, for each man, Pissarro held the center of a world of flux. For the later collector, the central landscape is larger than its flanking pair, and, in searching for a work by Pissarro, he found a painting of 1873 that had been owned by the opera singer, Faure, and that, in addition, exemplified the enduring rhythms of la France profonde. From the stately rhythmic verticals of the poplar trees in the middle distance to the repetitive plants, sheaves, and haystacks that give order to the hilly foreground, Pissarro's is a landscape completely organized by generations of peasants. The small farms and watermills that line the distant Viosne River peek out from the folds of the hills, and little flecks of blue, gray, and creamy white paint suggest a parasol, a peasant blouse, or a walking figure in the foreground. Tiny dabs of dark green on the top of the hill at left represent distant trees that seem almost to march along the road they define. And the clouds cling to the horizon, becoming smaller and, thus, taking us visually into an almost infinite agricultural distance. No church spire, railroad bridge, or château lends any locative specificity to this landscape, which is as much a visual hymn to the Ile-de-France itself as it is a representation of a particular place. In making it, Pissarro returned to the organizational principals he had adopted in 1866 and 1867 when his landscapes of the nearby hamlet of l'Hermitage near Pontoise were called "grave and reasoned" by the young writer-critic, Emile Zola. And what could flank this utterly serene visual poem to agricultural fecundity? To the left, the collector placed a painting by Monet made in the village of Louveciennes in the winter of 1869-70. For him, as for Monet, Impressionism was an art of all seasons, even the bone-chilling winter days in which it was difficult to stay out-of-doors very long to paint the motif en plein air. Yet, that is precisely what Monet did that winter, and he could do so because he was spending several days with his friend, Camille Pissarro, who lived in the second house from the left in this painting, making it possible for the artists to paint out-of-doors and to leave their easels occasionally to warm their hands and bodies around the Pissarro fireplace, drinking hot chocolate or mulled wine made by Mme Pissarro. The painting Monet made during that winter--it snowed a good deal in December of 1869, with record snowfalls recorded in the French papers--evokes a brisk winter walk down a snow-covered road under dull light from a heavily clouded sky--a light that refused shadows. The almost vertiginous triangle that defines the road forces us--as viewers--to rush through the landscape toward an unseen destination defined by our distant companions on this chilly day. They are simple daubs of dark gray paint, but we know that we will greet the man in the middle distance when he passes us. Pissarro painted the same street several times during that same snowstorm, and perhaps the closest to this one by Monet can be found in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Now, for the most difficult decision--the finding of a painting by Sisley as the right "wing" of this landscape triptych. All of us know that Alfred Sisley was at the apogee of his career in the first half of the 1870's, when he hardly ever painted a boring painting. Yet, keeping up qualitatively with a major Monet and a truly great Pissarro was not to prove easy for the Anglo-French painter, even at his best. Yet, the collector's search for precisely that Sisley paid off when he bought a wonderful 1875 landscape first owned by one of the most important connoisseurs of Impressionism, Count Doria. Of virtually identical dimension to the flanking winter landscape by Monet, Sisley's painting was made in the autumn of 1875, when the large oak or chestnut trees had lost their leaves and the poplars retained their dull yellow-brown foliage. A large farm on the banks of the Seine near Port-Marly anchors the composition, which is defined in rigid horizontal planes in a way precisely the opposite of the flanking Monet. Indeed, the three paintings represent three seasons--winter, summer, and autumn. They also represents three types of landscape spaces--one defined by a receding rural road, the second by the patchwork rhythm of agricultural fields, and the third by the implacable horizontal flow of a river. In painting the Seine, Sisley deliberately left the viewer's position ambiguous. Are we standing on the river bank or floating in a boat? In fact, we seem to be moving by this old farm, which will shortly disappear from our field of vision, whether we are walking or floating. Fascinatingly, the Sisley was signed and dated twice--both times to 1875. And the reasons for this must be surmised. There is a legend that came with the picture when the last owner acquired it that Count Doria himself had the painting reframed to cover some of the lower portion--probably to be a "pair" of another work now unidentified. When he did, Sisley re-signed it so that any of its viewers in Count Doria's immense rural castle in the north of France would know who painted it and when-- in its new framed dimensions. This tantalizing idea suggests that the Sisley may well have been part of another "triptych" of Impressionist paintings, one broken up at the sale of Count Doria's pictures in May of 1899. Perhaps an assiduous scholar, perusing the sale and, perhaps, working with photographs of Count Doria's castle will be able to identify the works in what could well have been a lost Impressionist triptych. It would have been difficult, however, for it to be better than this one. With paintings varying in date from 1869 to 1875, the most glorious years of Impressionism, the present triptych is more ambitious and more demanding for the interpreter than Ernest May's famous example in the Musée d'Orsay. Who knows? Perhaps some wise (and rich) collector will keep it together a little longer. Richard R. Brettell Margaret McDermott Distinguished Professor of Art and Aesthetics The University of Texas at Dallas (fig. 1) The Ernest May triptych. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. BARCODE 23657342, BARCODE 23657335, BARCODE 23657359 Property from a Private American Collection

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

Les pots verts sur la terrasse

Details

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)
Les pots verts sur la terrasse
stamped with signature 'Bonnard' (lower right)
oil on canvas
20½ x 33 in. (52.1 x 83.8 cm.)
Painted in 1912

Provenance

Mlle. A. Bowers, Paris (by descent from the artist).
Mr. and Mrs. Neison Harris, Chicago (acquired from the above, 18 February 1971).
By descent from the above to the present owner.

Literature

J. and H. Dauberville, Bonnard, catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1965, vol. II, p. 262, no. 697 (illustrated).

Exhibited

New York, Acquavella Galleries, Inc., Bonnard, November 1965, no. 15 (illustrated).
New York, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Ltd., Pierre Bonnard, June-July 1969, no. 7.

Special notice

On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale. This interest may include guaranteeing a minimum price to the consignor of property or making an advance to the consignor which is secured solely by consigned property. Such property is offered subject to a reserve. This is such a lot.

Lot Essay

In 1912, Bonnard was in the midst of an introspective period in which he attempted to reconcile and balance color with form. He had recently purchased a modest-two story residence at Veronnet, a hamlet in the Seine valley not far from Giverny. Following his move, the artist increasingly turned for his subject matter to his surroundings, creating canvases which are meditations on the people and places he encountered in his day-to-day life.

Bonnard's diaries recount his efforts to master "this color which maddens you" but which ultimately forced him to be more accurate in his drawing. An accomplished colorist, his palette, earlier dominated by darker tones, now brightened. He flooded his canvases with an intense light, making works such as Les pots verts sur la terrasse a triumph to the expressive power of color and the luminescence achieved from his study of the effects of sunlight. Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold offers insight into Bonnard's artistic process:

Once his inspiration has been fired, Bonnard would withdraw to his studio in order to stand back, as it were, from his models and to transpose them more freely into the world of his paintings. The point of departure--that is the initial composition--was modified, and either enlivened by details or else simplified, the proportions were distorted, the better to conform to his own particular conception, in other words, to his artistic vision (Bonnard, The Late Paintings, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and Dallas, Museum of Fine Arts, 1984, p. 72).

Particularly notable in the present work is the artist's talent for capturing atmospheric effects and his masterful depiction of light. Two vases are perched atop a table in the foreground, and the rolling hills of the French countryside (presumably Vernonnet and its environs) can be seen in the distance. The influence of Bonnard's close friend Henri Matisse is evident in the tapestry-like juxtaposition of flat and brightly-hued forms. "The principal subject is the surface," wrote Bonnard, "which has its color, its laws over and above those of objects" (quoted in N. Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 171).

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