Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)

Glowing with light and warmth, Le port de Cannes is a sumptuous visual hymn to life and beauty. Bonnard had already honed his skills as a colorist in the North of France, even before his fascination with the South flowered. He initially became enamored with the South of France in 1909 when he summered in Saint-Tropez, and soon began spending time in Cannes and Le Cannet, where he and his family eventually purchased a home in 1926. As an artist occupying the South and making it so integral to his work, Bonnard was drawn to the intoxicating light, as well as the deep art historical associations of the area, and during this time he began to produce more seascapes and landscapes that reflect his fascination with the intrinsic beauties found within nature. "I am about to understand this land and no longer try to find what isn't there, since it conceals tremendous beauties. To establish the different conceptions to which nature gives birth from this perspective, that is what really interests me" (quoted in Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p. 62).

In a break with the landscape tradition that would feature in some of Bonnard's most celebrated masterpieces, he has paid almost no attention to the sky in Le port de Cannes, allowing the lapis-like sea to remain the main focus, framed by the beach in the foreground and the boats at the harbor. The intense colors of this painting recall the Fauvism of Matisse that Bonnard had ostensibly shrugged off, evident likewise in paintings of the South such as his 1904 depiction of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. It is through this colorist musicality that the present work has its power, its composition filling it with visual, almost legible, rhythms, its various oils meeting in a symphony of expression.