Imagine an ideal day, an ideal Saturday. Would you choose the bleak, cold last one in January? I might do, if I could also choose to be in Paris. Then the cold, grey light would feel like a primed canvas for breakfast in bed: sliced bread and sweet fruit looking out over the moss-mottled rooftops. A musky metro journey to the Musée d’Orsay would leave my eyes ready for the shapes, colours, light and life hanging on the walls. Then I would find my stomach ready for lunch in a warm burgundy room, at a tiny table and all of that would only take me to two o’clock on this ideal day. It would leave me feeling full.
I try to remember that grey days like these exist, when it’s still winter and you still have to drag your feet across frosty pavements. It’s easy to forget that sometimes you can choose exactly how your day will unfold. Even if you can’t know how exactly it will leave you feeling.
On this Saturday, I chose Pierre Bonnard’s paintings. Seeking something I could get closer to than the Impressionists of the the fifth floor and also something new to me. I was pulled into their quiet ripples and curious compositions that focus on corners and characters and objects often as overlooked as our most ordinary days.
The table is laid with the aftermath of another day’s meal. A small coffee cup sits before him as he leans away from the table, softened and sustained. She leans into the dog, resting her hand on its paw, resting her eyes. It is an evening full of the richness of familiarity. The room asserts itself in its deep reds, bright greens and creamy yellows. The lamp has as much presence in the room as the people. It is more than just a light source, it is a pleasurable possession. I imagine enjoying its glow on the assemblage of crockery, cutlery and everyday items that set the scene for their days.
At another table, spoons are presented to distracted mouths. The lamp here is a cloud, a jellyfish, I see it as if through a child’s remembered eyes. In the background a small child’s eyes glint above their plump red cheeks as they look towards their siblings over the jug. One turns away from the table towards the frame, eyes downcast. Almost obscured in shadow, but when you notice you see the subtle humour of the scene.
These two paintings take conventional shapes of domestic days and transform them into shimmering memories, full of lived feeling. Bonnard didn’t paint from real life, he drew inspiration from sketching his days and then worked on multiple canvases at once. He said emotion comes in its own time. He was a founding member of the group known as Les Nabis, from the Hebrew word for prophet. As a group, they wanted to take art beyond the Impressionists into Modernism. They did that by prioritising colour and light over subject and form.
A woman in a striped orange blouse is lost in thought as the blue street rushes around her, all its energy contrasting with the pensive tilt of her head as she carries her basket. A woman is dappled in soft lilac, citrus light and framed as if we pass by her stretching her naked body before a morning bath. A woman in a checked red dress holds her cat tenderly in one hand, eating from her plate with the other.
Bonnard’s subjects are as vast as the interior, the domestic and the intimate allow. They are fleeting glimpses of ideals that lie more in the question of how we remember than how we imagine. His paintings are not the luminous idylls the Impressionists captured. They are memories heightened with colour and the subtle nuances we notice in the people and possessions we rub up against each day. The things that end up mattering most, even if they’re not how we imagined we would fill our days.
This is the only Bonnard painting I’ve seen in London, it’s at the Tate Britain (I think in the same room as this Gwen John) if you’re interested in taking a look at his captured, full-coloured days.