Boating (Le canotage)

The 1890s constitute Pierre Bonnard’s great decade of printmaking, characterized by inventiveness and bold experimentation. As he wrote, “I’ve discovered a lot that applies to painting by doing color lithography. When you have to judge tonal relationships by juggling with four or five colors, superimposing them or juxtaposing them, you learn a great deal.” This lithograph shows not only Bonnard’s fine manipulation of colors—four of them—but also his ingenious distortions of space. The slab of green at the left, which seems to rise up vertically, is actually a spread of riverbank, a place where people take their leisure, and the crisscrossing elements forming a strong horizontal at the top of the composition are the iron bars of a bridge spanning the river. Below the bridge, dabs of green suggest the play of light on the surface of the water. The legendary dealer Ambroise Vollard printed Boating for the second Album d’estampes originales, for which Bonnard also supplied the cover.

Resource: Chelsea Foxwell and Anne Leonard, Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints, exh. cat. (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 142–43.