This huge canvas, one of Bonnard's most famous, represents the dining room of Ma Roulotte, the country house on the right bank of the Seine that he bought in 1912. It was situated at Vernonnet, where the Søle-de-France borders on Normandy. The dining room was located on the ground floor, while along the upper story ran a gallery that looked out over the whole valley of the Seine. In later years, this gallery furnished a foreground for more than one of those big, decorative compositions in which Bonnard attempted to encompass all the verdant luxuriance of the landscape before his eyes. But here, in 1913, Bonnard has stopped with the ground floor, his landscape appearing only timidly as a backdrop glimpsed through the door and the wide-open window. A lover of the intimate and psychologically somewhat cool, Bonnard made his first overtures to nature in prudent steps, seeing it from indoors; but one day, as Thadée Natanson writes, 'the landscape, entering by the windows of the little house, will take possession there with charming naturalness, diffusing within the four walls all its diversity and coloristic wealth.'

The composition of Dining Room in the Country is based on the contrast between the outdoors and the interior: in the landscape, a rustling freedom, with vividly modulated and contrasting tonalities; in the interior, the more rigid architecture, the more intimate and muted color, laid on in broad areas. Accentuating the contrast, Bonnard has posed a particularly frail tree to the right of the composition as a balance to the sharply geometric design of the door; but the painter also links his two contrasting picture zones by carefully worked-out transitional devices, such as the green reflections that the landscape casts into the blue of the door, the breeze-stirred curtains slightly lifted into the interior of the room, and, especially, the charming presence of the young woman (Marthe).

Obviously, Bonnard is already much engaged with those problems of structure which were to become his major concern in later years. The interrupted diagonal composition might have been suggested to him by recollections of Japanese prints, but it is here very rigidly treated, reinforced by the presence of the chair and the manner in which the window is thrown back against the wall. Any trace of schematic dryness, however, is effaced by his inclusion of various small tasteful details (the bouquet of poppies, the cats, the plates of fruit), and especially by the form, bold and unexpected in such a composition, of the table, the color of which picks up that of the distant sky and in its lyricism contrasts with the still somewhat 'Nabi' tonality of the interior.

Accession Number

54.15 

Provenance

The artist (until 1913, sold, November 7, to Bernheim-Jeune); [Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1913–at least 1939] [1]; Gaston Bernheim de Villers, Paris (until d. 1953).[2] [Sam Salz, New York, until 1954; sold, November 23, for $36,000, to the Minneapolis Institute of Art] [1] Galerie Bernheim-Jeune was founded by brothers Gaston Bernheim de Villers (1870–1953) and Josse Bernheim (1870–1941), the sons of art dealer Alexandre Bernheim (1833–1915). Mia?s Bonnard painting may have become part of Gaston Bernheim's private collection upon the death of Josse in 1941. [2] Madame Gaston Bernheim de Villers, Suzanne Adler (1883–1961), survived her husband and may have inherited the painting in 1953.