Painted in a hotel room in Uriage-les- Bains, Bonnard’s composition creates three paintings in one. Within the room we glimpse a still-life vignette on a table; beyond the open window a lush townscape unfolds, glowing with yellow, orange and purple in the late evening light. In the foreground, shadows beneath the window form abstract areas of vibrant colour.
Uriage-les-Bains, near Grenoble, is renowned for its thermal springs. Bonnard and Marthe de Méligny spent time here between 1918 and 1919, and were visited by art critic George Besson, who later commented that ‘[Bonnard’s] true studio is anywhere and everywhere: in furnished villas and hotel rooms with indescribable décor – often a cheap light fixture in the ceiling, always that flowered wallpaper, which the paintings cover over, little by little’.
Pierre Bonnard
French 1867–1947
The open window, yellow wall (La Fenêtre ouverte, mur jaune) c. 1919
oil on canvas
59.0 × 54.6 cm
Private collection
Courtesy of Wildenstein & Co. Inc., New York
