One day, writes my mother, we brought Bonnard a luminous bouquet of garden flowers fresh leaves, two dark lilac-coloured irises and a mass of orange or sulphur-yellow marigolds. Bonnard put them in an orange and green Provençal jug on the mantelpiece ; and against a glowing yellow background the colour combination was intensified.

This happened on one of our customary Thursday visits. By the Saturday all was recorded on canvas, a little paler, of course. Day by day the picture lost its brilliance just as the flowers did. The delicate leaves of the irises withered and became grey ; in the end they hung, pitifully limp, on their stem. The whole ensemble took on an in- creasingly symbolic quality as it became more melancholy it was like an image of the fragility of natural things. To see them perish and almost disappear, the stalks dry up, the twigs lose their leaves, was a profound experience. We asked Bonnard what his wife's arm was doing at the top of the picture. 'Nothing at all' he answered, 'I needed something in that part of the picture. I might just as well have hung a mascot on the wall, but I put in the arm, and that's all there is to it.' This answer is a good pointer to the style of Bonnard's last years.

This picture is the latest to find a place in our collection; Bonnard died before we could visit him again and acquire more of his work. The colour-effect produced by an object, or its place in the composition, had taken on more importance than the object itself; thus the yellow strip at the bottom of the picture is merely a band of colour projecting forward from the mantelpiece.

A few years later, Bonnard treated a similar subject, this time in the square format he liked so much. The com- position is organized in three zones of colour-blue, white and yellow-to avoid sharp intersections of surfaces conflicting with the edge of the picture. The square is divided in two vertically, and the vase is not in the centre. The flowers are indistinct and unidentifiable: did they fade like those of the Provençal jug or did Bonnard only replace those in front with fresh, brilliant Riviera anemones ? The mysterious arm has been replaced by an equally mysterious piece of frame.

Inscr. b.r. : Bonnard

Formerly collection Hahnloser-BZhler, Winterthu