Houses in the Courtyard

This suite of color lithographs collected Pierre Bonnard’s observations of city life, ranging from animated street scenes to distant observations glimpsed from the artist’s Montmartre studio window. Rather than memorializing the famous monuments of Paris, Bonnard preferred to depict small neighborhood scenes populated by urbanites shopping and strolling and by vendors selling their wares. The setting for one of the prints is the second-largest public park in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne, which was a popular place for families to relax, stroll, and enjoy carriage rides around the lakes. Two prints are nocturnal scenes in which gaslight emanating from shop windows is reflected on the wet streets, creating passages of bright yellow in the otherwise dark compositions. Bonnard’s favorite subjects, such as the Parisienne—a young, fashionable, modern woman—as well as children and dogs, appear repeatedly throughout the prints in the suite.