Pierre Bonnard
After the Meal1925

On view:

Geffen Galleries

Oil painting of a dining table set with wine bottles, fruit, and serving dishes, with a woman in a striped jacket leaning over the far edge

Artist or Maker: Pierre Bonnard
Title: After the Meal
Culture: French
Date Made: 1925
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Canvas: 45 5/8 × 44 in. (115.89 × 111.76 cm) Framed: 56 5/8 × 55 3/8 × 4 3/8 in. (143.83 × 140.65 × 11.11 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of A. Jerrold Perenchio
Accession Number: M.2025.64.8
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: European Painting and Sculpture
Curatorial Notes: Pierre Bonnard, who maintained a fairly consistent visual vocabulary for nearly five decades, noted in his journal that a “picture is a series of blotches which are joined together and finally form the object, the finished piece, over which the eye may wander completely unhindered.” This trajectory from paint to subject matter is on brilliant display in the monumental After the Meal. The composition is structured by the table legs, chair, sideboard, door at right, kitchen opening at left, and playful red stripes on the prominent white tablecloth. This linearity is reinforced by the careful placement of smaller objects such as wine bottles and carafes, as well as the detailed patterns on the floor and clothing. The only element to break the framework is the posture of the woman at right, identified as Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard’s longtime companion whom he married the year of this painting. Lifting an empty fruit dish, her bent figure opposes the rigid horizontal and vertical arrangement. Yet the artist’s palette choices—the hue of her red hair and striped shirt, the white and red stripes of her skirt—lock her into the grid of architecture and patterning.

Around the mid-1920s, Bonnard created a number of large interior scenes such as this one, with a table at center and minimal action. Remarking that his goal was “to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden,” he presents in these ambitious compositions more impression than specificity. They exude a sense of familiarity and memory, an understanding of what is there holistically, without a parsing of the individually observed parts.

2024
Provenance: The artist, sold November 1925 to; [Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, to]; Gaston Bernheim de Villers (1870–1953), Paris, by as early as 1938. [Sam Salz (1894–1981) Inc., New York, probably c. 1950].(1) William (1903–1969) and Edith Mayer (1905–1988) Goetz, Los Angeles (sale, New York, Christie’s, 14 November 1988, lot 27, to);(2) A. J. Perenchio (1930–2017), Los Angeles, gifted 2025 to; Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Footnotes
(1) The Getty Research Institute Photo Archive and the National Gallery of Art’s Art Dealer Archives contain a Sam Salz black-and-white photograph of this painting with a Sam Salz Archive stamp and label on the verso. A label on the back of the painting also refers to Sam Salz: “SS 174 New York.”
(2) Film producer William Goetz and his wife, Edith, the daughter of the film mogul Louis B. Mayer, were part of Hollywood’s heyday, and by the 1940s they had started amassing what would become one of the finest West Coast collections of Impressionist and modern art. In addition to this Bonnard, the Goetzes owned Cézanne’s The Rondest House, l’Hermitage, Pontoise, cat. 7. They probably purchased the work from Sam Salz.
Selected Bibliography: Lehmbeck, Leah, ed. Impressionist and Modern Art: The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016.
Copyright: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, photo © Fredrik Nilsen

Pierre Bonnard
After the Meal1925

On view:

Geffen Galleries

Artist or Maker: Pierre Bonnard
Title: After the Meal
Culture: French
Date Made: 1925
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Canvas: 45 5/8 × 44 in. (115.89 × 111.76 cm) Framed: 56 5/8 × 55 3/8 × 4 3/8 in. (143.83 × 140.65 × 11.11 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of A. Jerrold Perenchio
Accession Number: M.2025.64.8
Classification: Paintings
Collecting Area: European Painting and Sculpture
Curatorial Notes: Pierre Bonnard, who maintained a fairly consistent visual vocabulary for nearly five decades, noted in his journal that a “picture is a series of blotches which are joined together and finally form the object, the finished piece, over which the eye may wander completely unhindered.” This trajectory from paint to subject matter is on brilliant display in the monumental After the Meal. The composition is structured by the table legs, chair, sideboard, door at right, kitchen opening at left, and playful red stripes on the prominent white tablecloth. This linearity is reinforced by the careful placement of smaller objects such as wine bottles and carafes, as well as the detailed patterns on the floor and clothing. The only element to break the framework is the posture of the woman at right, identified as Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard’s longtime companion whom he married the year of this painting. Lifting an empty fruit dish, her bent figure opposes the rigid horizontal and vertical arrangement. Yet the artist’s palette choices—the hue of her red hair and striped shirt, the white and red stripes of her skirt—lock her into the grid of architecture and patterning.

Around the mid-1920s, Bonnard created a number of large interior scenes such as this one, with a table at center and minimal action. Remarking that his goal was “to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden,” he presents in these ambitious compositions more impression than specificity. They exude a sense of familiarity and memory, an understanding of what is there holistically, without a parsing of the individually observed parts.

2024
Provenance: The artist, sold November 1925 to; [Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, to]; Gaston Bernheim de Villers (1870–1953), Paris, by as early as 1938. [Sam Salz (1894–1981) Inc., New York, probably c. 1950].(1) William (1903–1969) and Edith Mayer (1905–1988) Goetz, Los Angeles (sale, New York, Christie’s, 14 November 1988, lot 27, to);(2) A. J. Perenchio (1930–2017), Los Angeles, gifted 2025 to; Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Footnotes
(1) The Getty Research Institute Photo Archive and the National Gallery of Art’s Art Dealer Archives contain a Sam Salz black-and-white photograph of this painting with a Sam Salz Archive stamp and label on the verso. A label on the back of the painting also refers to Sam Salz: “SS 174 New York.”
(2) Film producer William Goetz and his wife, Edith, the daughter of the film mogul Louis B. Mayer, were part of Hollywood’s heyday, and by the 1940s they had started amassing what would become one of the finest West Coast collections of Impressionist and modern art. In addition to this Bonnard, the Goetzes owned Cézanne’s The Rondest House, l’Hermitage, Pontoise, cat. 7. They probably purchased the work from Sam Salz.
Selected Bibliography: Lehmbeck, Leah, ed. Impressionist and Modern Art: The A. Jerrold Perenchio Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016.