Music theory illustrated (Petit solfège illustré)

Le petit solfège illustré, one of Pierre Bonnard’s first publications, was a collaborative project with his brother-in-law, the composer Claude Terrasse. A music primer intended for children, it includes charming and whimsical illustrations by Bonnard. While the illustrations reflect the stylistic influence of the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin and Japanese art, they are integrated with the texts and musical examples in distinctly inventive ways. At this stage, in the early 1890s, Bonnard was a member of the Nabis (the Prophets), a group of artists inspired by Symbolism and interested in art as a means for exploring emotions and spiritual themes, and he was experimenting in various media with closely cropped perspectives, flat planes of color, and arabesque forms. During his work on the illustrations to Le petit solfège, he wrote to his friend Édouard Vuillard, “I have to think of the decorators of ancient missals, or of the art that the Japanese put into the decoration of encyclopedic dictionaries to give myself some courage.” The cover typifies the posters that would become so important to the Nabis’ work for advertising and the theatre.

Resource: Martha Ward and Anne Leonard, Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France, exh. cat. (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008), pp. 60–64.