Radical cropping and a strong sense of visual rhythm are hallmarks of Bonnard’s still lifes, a genre which suited his experimental approach to composition perfectly. Even in his earliest intimiste paintings of the 1890s, Bonnard had shown how the tightly circumscribed space of a tablecloth could be made to seem as expansive as landscape and the configuration of elements as apparently haphazard as his portraits. In Assiette de Fraises, the viewer glimpses fugitive elements of the still life at the edges of the canvas in much the same way as his partner Marthe is occasionally half-seen through a doorway in his interior scenes.

The influence of photography on this aspect of Bonnard’s painting is self-evident, though the unvarnished verisimilitude of that.mes dium held little appeal for him. As Charles Sterling comments: "His still lifes are assortments of fruit on tables or in cupboards exposed to the sun; but departing from the Impressionists' literal-minded naturalism, he gives them an air of strange enchantment. His objects are pervaded by the light and heat of the sun, whose rays seem to melt down the fruits to a colored essence of their flesh and their taste—his interiors are fragrant with it" (Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, New York, 1981, p. 124).

Bonnard’s understanding of tonal relationships and his instinctive ability to handle vibrant color is superbly demonstrated in the present work. “The principal subject,” Bonnard maintained, “is the surface which has color, its laws over and above those of the objects” (quoted in Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 171). Only a casual critic could mistake Bonnard for a conservative or an anachronism in twentieth century art. In his extensive use of white paint for example, he was more radical than his subject-matter suggests and anticipates the work of Piet Mondrian.

As James Elliott put it, “His return and adherence to nature in a period that produced fauvism, cubism, and pure abstraction had looked like a retreat. It has proven, instead to be another instance of reculer pour mieux sauter—of stepping back to leap further. Bonnard's ‘naturalism’ became a springboard for dazzling innovations through which he rejoined the main tradition of his t.mes , enriched it, and assumed a place in the highest rank of its artists” (James Elliott in Bonnard and His Environment (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964, p. 29). The present work, gifted to his fellow Nabis artist Félix Vallotton in 1922, is one of the finest examples of its kind and has remained in a private collects ion for almost twenty years.

Masters of White

Bonnard was a master of the rich variations that can be achieved with near-white tones. As the Tate Modern’s gallery Painting with White demonstrates, subsequent artists have continued to discover that an apparently reduced range of hues allows for a range of possibilities. Other twentieth-century painters who have employed these subtleties to great effect include Malevich, Lowry, Morandi and Auerbach.