The still life motif formed an integral part of Bonnard’s œuvre and Bouquet de fleurs is exemplative of the artist’s long-standing exploration of colour. Bonnard applies broad gestural brushstrokes to delineate a profusion of flowers and verdant foliage that rise from a decorative blue vase and infuse the composition with a dynamic ebullience. A two-tone backdrop of warm ochre and cool blues complements the vivid floral arrangement. Through this carefully chosen palette, Bonnard creates compositions evocative of a particular moment in t.mes : ‘Bonnard’s colours came to embody the emerging, meeting, and passing of forms in the transient world, whose components he turned into shapes and planes of saffron red, gold light, and violet shadows [...] His Mediterranean palette and dazzling light added further abstraction to a corpus of paintings that became less obviously descriptive and more metaphoric over t.mes ” (Dita Amory, Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, pp. 22-23).

When choosing his subject matter, Bonnard painted items that were familiar to him, often returning to the same objects t.mes and again. This familiarity played a key role in Bonnard’s artistic practice as he rarely worked from life, preferring instead to paint from memory. Curator and art historian Dita Amory describes the effect of this process: ‘As Bonnard painted his memory of the still life in the other room, he edited out extraneous information, uncluttering the composition. What he rendered permanent was the experience of passing through, say, the dining room set for breakfast…’ (D. Amory in ibid., New York, 2009, p. 11). This process reflects Bonnard’s investigative approach to painting, which he summarised in a stat.mes nt to his nephew Charles Terrasse in 1927: ‘The eye of the painter gives human value to objects, reproduces things as a human eye sees them. And this vision is mobile. And this vision is variable... The eye sees distant masses as having an almost linear aspect, without relief, without depth. But near objects rise towards it. The sides trail away. And these vanishing trails are somet.mes s rectilinear— for what is distant—somet.mes s curved—for planes that are near. The vision of distant things is a flat vision. It is the near planes that give the idea of the universe as the human eye sees it’ (Bonnard quoted in The Work of Art: Suspending t.mes (exhibition catalogue), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2006, p. 57). Infused with the vitality of the flowers, Bouquet de fleurs is a beautifully orchestrated celebration of colour and life.