Blossoms

Some blossoms for another rainy day. This, the last painting Bonnard worked on, at eighty, just before his death.

Too ill to hold the brush, Bonnard begged his nephew Charles Terrasse to change a green patch to orange. It is one of the most intensely poetic pictures in this century. The 80-year-old creator had just managed to complete his hymn to joy, discreetly sung in deep solitude.

image: Pierre Bonnard, L'amandier en fleurs (The Almond Tree in Blossom), 1945