Mme Hahnloser writes Arthur several times asked his intimate friend Bonnard to paint picture including one or more of us. should like nothing better, answered Bonnard. 'Give me the enchanted setting for a picture and I will do it ! One afternoon when we were going back to the islands with a good wind blowing, I appeared wearing an old pale blue jersey. 'That's it,' cried Bonnard, 'the enchantment that makes a painting. The purity of ' Bonnard blue' had so caught his imagination that he settled down at the other end of the boat, drew out his sketchbook and started to draw. We told him that we could spend about 5,000 francs on the picture, and the very next day it was

already roughed out on a canvas approximately 66 X 70 cm. Mme Bonnard, 'Marthe the demon' who was already beginning to suffer from mental disturbance, came 0n the scene. S My dear Pierre,' she cried, 'why don't you go on and make it smaller ? You'll never get everything you want to say about the Hahnlosers on that little bit of canvas !' Bonnard said nothing, but the following Thursday (Thursday was the day when we used to go up to their house) the canvas on the wall was about twice as large. We were trying to explain, in Our embarrassment, that we could not accept such a large picture, when Bonnard said calmly : All right, the rest will be a present for the Doctor, and there's and end to it.'

In the first version Le Père Arthur' has his back to the women and is gazing into the distance. ' A true sailor,' Bonnard explained, 'always looks at the horizon for a quarter of an hour before he a sails. Your husband is a true sailor, isn't he ?'

It was clear that he had set out to make him the principal figure in the painting ; he was really fond of my

Back in Paris, he wrote to husband. us : *I beg you to send me back the big canvas. Seldom have I bungled anything so completely. All one sees is the white of the sail.' This as a typical example of his conscien- tiousness. The picture came back to us a few months later with more life and more colour; it seemed to have become the antithesis of what it had been. Vuillard and Vallotton, who were there to celebrate the occasion, explained that the picture had been improved because one could now see the volume of the figures. As for Bonnard, in the midst of the general rejoicing, he asked those present to estimate how much he had changed the size of the sail. This seemed easy, but the estimates reflected individual temperament very closely. Vuillard 3ó4the just' kept close to a happy medium ; Vallotton the mathematician, came within an inch to or so of the truth. The lady of the house was induced guess as much as seventeen centimetres. Then, with an ironic smile, Bonnard told us. 'Not one centimetre,' he said. 'The illusion that the sail shrank enormously comes entirely from the heightening of the intensity of the colour, especially the blue of the sea. The effect of colour alters the proportions completely. This was a surprise and a lesson to me.'

Bonnard never made any sketches in colour; the most he did was to make notes indicating the intensity of colour in figures, such as *cobalt 20, blue 2, ochre 10'. A few detail drawings were all he needed to achieve a likeness in a portrait.

We illustrate several surviving sketches for The Sea Trip as well as the picture itself. These show clearly how the first version in oils sprang from the drawings, and the study of my mother is extremely alive; only the profile of my sister seems influenced by Bonnard' favourite feminine type.

–The presence of the object disturbs the artist,” Bonnard said one day. His work was done in the studio, away from his models, and is based on an inner vision which springs from the 'idea' he had of his picture. The first rough version in oils still looks like three juxtaposed portrait studies. The little pen-drawing, done in his studio (p. 104) shows him in search of a new composition: he detaches the figures from their background, giving the elements of the composition -the sea, the boat, the sail-more space and more unity, and marks off the rectangle. Later still he settled on a square format a difficult one even for him. It was only after eighteen months that he achieved the right tonality; a friendship of long-standing had given rise to a masterpiece.

Inscr. b.r.: Bonnard

Formerly collection Hahnloser-BZhler, Winterthur