The Croquet Game

During the period 1890-92, Gauguin and Japan were the major influences on Bonnard's work, affecting both the imagery and decorative character of his work, from The Parade Ground (1890; private collection), a humorous souvenir of a military period, up to the great composition of the Croquet Game (1892; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which depicts his family playing in the park at Grand-Lemps.

The painting represents the garden of the family home, in Grand-Lemps, in Isère. It depicts the artist's family playing croquet. We can recognize from left to right the painter's father, his sister Andrée, his brother-in-law, the musician Claude Terrasse in the company of a friend. In the background, five young women dressed in white dance a frenzied round.

The contrast between the frieze effect in the foreground and the animated scene in the background is not the only audacity of the painting. The croquet players’ clothes with their checkered prints seem to have no thickness, juxtaposed as if glued to the foliage. The subject of this painting is impressionistic: the pleasures of a beautiful summer in the countryside. However, Bonnard "the very Japanese nabi", as his friends called him, treats the scene in flat tints and ornaments, no doubt inspired by the Japanese prints of which he was very fond. The whole is a pretext for the declension of monochrome of greens into the weft of which the white silhouettes are inserted.