In 1926, at the age of 60, Pierre Bonnard moved into a villa in the Côte d’Azur, above Cannes.

He placed great value in living entirely for painting secluded from the Parisian art scene. He dedicated these final decades of his life in the south to the art of landscape painting. However, Bonnard didn’t paint outside. During his walks he sketched motifs and noted the colours, but he painted the pictures in his studio. During a long process, and distanced from the real landscape, Bonnard recreated the painted landscape from memory.

This view has been painted from an elevated location. We are looking across Cannes and out to sea. Bonnard shows no panorama but squeezes the landscape into a narrow vertical format. Trees frame the left and right of the visual field and the view is concentrated on the opening between them.

Here, in the centre of the picture, the colours are at their most intense: the orange of the roofs radiates out of the green, and the Prussian blue of the olive grove confines it in the background. The colours in the foreground appear to shimmer in the heat, and above the horizon they become fine nuances of colour. We are in fact, looking at a landscape completely resolved in colour, a landscape that Bonnard painted in fine dashes so that objects lost their contours.

There are two girls embedded in the landscape in the foreground. At first glance they are hardly visible. They are concealed in the lush vegetation, suspended in Bonnard’s colourfulness.