Les Boulevards - Paris Boulevards by Pierre Bonnard, 1867-1947

Pierre Bonnard, 1867-1947
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Les Boulevards - Paris Boulevards

Original lithograph in four colours. 1899/1900. Numbered with the stamp number lower left. Very rare impression with variant colours from the first edition issued in Paris in a proposed edition of 100 by La Maison Moderne, Paris for the Pan-Insel portfolio, part 2, 1899/1900. Before the usual edition for the Insel album, Leipsig, 1900. Printed in Paris, 1899.
Ref: R. Marx 74; Bouvet 72.
Provenance: Coll. Le Garrec.

Superb impression with excellent colours. On pale off-white chine volant paper. Generally excellent condition; a suggestion of one or two small fox marks visible on the verso but not on the front; two tiny nicks in the sheet margin edge have been repaired to prevent any further damage. Full margins. Sheet: 13 1/8?x16 3/8?. Image overall: 10?x13 1/8? (268x333mm).

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Bonnard?s study of the hurrying crowd of people, the cabs and carriages on the street, and the hot pavements of Paris in the summer entitled Les Boulevards is a beautiful and very typical composition from the early Nabis period of his oeuvre in lithography. The use of the pattern of the shapes and the colours to capture the atmosphere and movement of the city life characterizes his fascination with expressing not only the visual imagery but also the emotion of everyday life. Bonnard was, without any argument, one of the greatest of all the Parisian artists who became fascinated with the medium of lithography in the last period of the nineteenth century. He has a supreme feeling for the way that combinations of line and stroke could be combined in lithography to create visual effect which would not be possible in any other medium. His colour lithographs of the 1890?s stand as masterpieces of their genre.

This impression of Les Boulevards is also of very special interest from the point of view of the connoisseurship of Bonnard?s graphic work, for it comes from the exceptionally scarce first French edition, with differing colours from the normal edition (see above) and with the stamp edition number (never normally present). The subject of Les Boulevards was commissioned from Bonnard by Julius Meier Graefe for the print publishers Insel in Germany. The impressions that are usually seen come from the edition of some 200 impressions issued in the German Insel album in 1900. However, it was recently discovered that prior to the German issue an edition was printed in Paris for a special French issue of the Insel album. It would appear from the evidence in an American private collection of Bonnard?s work that this issue was intended to be of 100 impressions, but the extraordinary scarcity of examples of the French edition (it was unknown to all the cataloguers of Bonnard?s work from Roger Marx to Bouvet) suggest that the issue may never have been completed or that for some reason it was lost. The impression above is the only impression that we have ever come across in over 30 years from this first issue - the colours, as described above, are much richer and softer than in the regular edition, creating a warm tonality full of the atmosphere of a summer evening.