Painted near Cannes in 1924, La Chevelure d'or presents a resplendent scene from the artist’s Mediterranean-inspired oeuvre. This quintessential interior seamlessly melds the artist’s subjects with their surroundings and glorifies a quotidian moment in luminous swathes of pigment. Demonstrating Bonnard’s profound mastery of color, the work draws attention to the rich, jewel-like tones of the fruit and women’s clothing and plays on the signature features of the artist’s two main muses of the t.mes : Bonnard’s lover, the effervescent blonde Renée Monchaty, and his mysterious dark-haired companion and eventual wife, Marthe de Méligny.

The two figures are not, however, the only point of focus of the composition, for at front and center atop a table is a Cezannesque mound of glistening fruit in a basket.It is for his still lifes, as much as for his close examination of his female companions, that Bonnard is best known. On the power of Bonnard’s still lifes, Dita Amory writes: “We can read and interpret Bonnard’s still lifes in much the same way we do his figures, as not still at all, but quietly transient. A master of presence, Bonnard transformed discrete, often mundane moments of t.mes ...into t.mes less images… And yet, Bonnard was also a master of absence. We glean from many of the inanimate objects in his interiors a sense of those who have laid the table, moved a plate, or taken a fruit. The possibility of reentry—that someone who is absent will once again intrude into our field of vision, or into our mind’s eye—is always left open” (Dita Amory, “The Present of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings,” in Pierre Bonnard, The Late Still Lifes and Interiors (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 26).

Much like Cézanne, whose experiments with depth and perspective resulted in numerous still lifes, Bonnard also carefully constructed his composition with flattened expanses and foreshortened angles. Continuing in the Nabis tradition of decorative painting, Bonnard employs flat planes of color, building depth in the scene through the clever delineation of light and dark as in La Salle de petit déjeuner (see fig. 1). Bonnard’s hazy definition and unusual configuration of his subjects lends an air of mystery to his compositions, as the viewer can never be certain of just what is before them, nor of where one form ends and another begins. While the central female figure and basket of fruit dominate the scene, the edges of the work seem to dance away and the sharp cropping of the bowl and figure at upper right further add to the air of mystery and vignette. Bonnard used similar devices is Les Comptes de la journée (see fig. 2).

The depiction of such moments was central to Bonnard’s artistic vision. A contemporary critic Roger-Marx noted in 1893 that the artist’s work: “catches fleeting poses, steals unconscious gestures, crystallizes the most transient expressions” (quoted in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 33). Much has been written about the influence of photography on this aspect of Bonnard’s painting. The artist’s earliest experiments with photography date to the period of his involvement with the Nabis; this group of young artists were predictably intrigued by the new technology and began to use it as another means of capturing everyday life and as a counterpoint to their painterly investigations of the same subjects.

Given Bonnard’s early involvement with the Nabis, it is unsurprising that light and, more importantly, color were so imaginatively explored in his mature work. In La Chevelure d'or he combines a loose, textured application of paint with a relatively flattened perspective and rich patterning and coloration; these latter reveal his close relationship with artists like Gauguin and his more direct contemporary, Matisse, but Bonnard’s distinctive palette and careful juxtapositions of color are unique to him alone. As John Rewald writes, "With the exception of Vuillard, no painter of his generation was to endow his technique with so much sensual delight, so much feeling for the indefinable texture of paint, so much vibration. His paintings are covered with color applied with a delicate voluptuousness that confers to the pigment a life of its own and treats every single stroke like a clear note of a symphony. At the same t.mes Bonnard's colors changed from opaque to transparent and brilliant, and his perceptiveness seemed to grow as his brush found ever more expert and more subtle means to capture the richness both of his imagination and of nature" (quoted in Pierre Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1948, p. 48).

Discussing Bonnard’s groundbreaking period of the 1920s, John Rewald writes: “His new maturity aimed higher and did away with the narrative tendencies of his brush. Instead, a much rarer quality is found in his work, a quality achieved only by the great: serenity. Above the accidental and the unexpected, it embodies the deep wisdom of a soul at peace with itself and the world” (Pierre Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland & The Museum of Modern Art, New York, op. cit., p. 50). La Chevelure d'or is among Bonnard’s most lauded paintings of the t.mes .

Recent shows including the Musée D’Orsay’s 2015 retrospective Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia and the Tate’s 2019 exhibition The Colour of Memory highlighted masterpieces like the present work, whose opalescent coloration charted a new, emboldened course for the artist.