Dining Room in the Country
Pierre Bonnard, 1913
Image not available: work still under copyright
Dining Room in the Country is an oil-on-canvas work that Pierre Bonnard painted in 1913, now held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It shows the dining room of a country house the artist bought in 1912 in Verbon, a small town on the Seine, which he nicknamed "My Caravan." A large table dressed with a white cloth dominates the foreground, with armchairs placed to the right and left. Cats sit on the chairs, and Martha, the artist's wife, leans against a windowsill. The most striking feature is the link between inside and outside: the door and window stand wide open, so the garden seems to flow into the room and the interior dissolves into the landscape. Bonnard uses vivid colors and broad, loose strokes that blur edges and shapes. Unusually for an impressionist, he painted the whole canvas from memory. The horizontal lines are deliberately uncertain, with wavering brushwork along the window and door frames, which is often read as a way of expressing the porous boundary between the two spaces.
- Painter
- Pierre Bonnard
- Date
- 1913
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 164 × 206 cm
- Museum
- Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis
- Genre
- interior view