Sunday

This is Assiette de fraises, or a plate of strawberries, by Pierre Bonnard, painted in 1922. You might think it was a detail from it, but it’s the whole canvas. Bonnard’s use of cropping is radical - you can’t definitively tell what the other objects are, or even where the table begins or ends. (Photography was influencing painting during this period, and Bonnard used cropping brilliantly in his portraits too. Here’s his wife in the bath, for e.g.).

Here it has the effect of rebalancing the whole painting: in most still lives, the strawberries would be in the centre and the objects arranged within striking distance. By not doing that, and by not even acknowledging symmetry, Bonnard treats the composition a bit as if it were a landscape. There’s a random, relaxed quality to the objects, as if they’d just landed wherever they wanted to land - the opposite of very formal and tightly composed classical still lives. It creates an immediate feeling of intimacy.

And the textures! He’s not whacking the paint on thickly to achieve them, either - just painting colour and light. Those luminous strawbs are practically Smell-O-Vision. I also love the table cloth, hit by full sun - you can almost feel the white heat shimmering off it - and looking quite like a bleached-out sky. The whole effect is very alive and undusty, and to me slightly magical. The things in the painting are ordinary, but also utterly sumptuous. You look at it and think, what strawberries! What table linen!

(Bonnard, like Vuillard, was another member of Les Nabis - see the previous picture post - as was Sarah Lock’s great grandfather. She wrote about it here).

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