Stairs with Mimosa - Pierre Bonnard (ca. 1946)

Pierre Bonnard

Oil on canvas

The Phillips Collection

Stairs with Mimosa is a late oil painting by the French Post-Impressionist master Pierre Bonnard, depicting a staircase enveloped in the luminous yellow bloom of mimosa trees at his villa Le Bosquet in Le Cannet, on the French Riviera. The composition is characteristic of Bonnard's final decade, in which the garden at Le Cannet became an endlessly revisited source of radiant, color-saturated imagery. Bonnard, a founding member of the avant-garde group Les Nabis in the 1890s, developed a highly personal vision rooted in Post-Impressionism, notable for its bold chromatic invention, flattened planes, and intimate observation of domestic and natural surroundings. Executed in the last year of his life, the painting exemplifies the near-abstract dissolution of form into pure color that defined his most celebrated late works.