As we can see in Young Woman at the Piano, Bonnard’s initial reaction to the Japanese prints had been an appreciation for the strong blocks of color, a simple passion which helped him to recognize the importance of color and which he incorporated into his own work for their eye-catching appeal, however, it was his later realization of the compositional value of these colors that most profoundly influenced his development as a colorist. Japanese woodblock prints lacked the European techniques of one-point perspective and three-dimensional shading, yet they maintained a sense of depth through color. Objects in the foreground are depicted in bright colors and eye-catching prints, prioritizing what we should focus on in the painting. Indeed, Bonnard stated his revelation on color as a means for composition as follows:
I understood … from these crude images that color could express anything, without needing modeling or [three-dimensional] relief. It seemed to me then that it was possible to translate light, form, and character with nothing more than color. (Pierre Bonnard, qtd. A. Terrasse, Shimmering Color 22)
In this passage, we see that Bonnard’s eyes were clearly opened to the potential of color to express every element of an artistic composition by the bright Japanese prints. Here, Bonnard himself recognized that it was from Japanese art that he learned how to convey space and perspective using only color—the prints make logical sense to the eye, but have none of the perspective of classical western art. Ironically, Antoine Terrasse quoted this passage to draw our attention to the influence of Japanese prints on Bonnard, but he fails to make the seemingly obvious connection between this early use of color and his later identification of himself as a colorist. Despite recognizing through this quotation that Japanese prints taught Bonnard the great value of color, he makes the contradictory claim in the same book that Bonnard doesn’t appreciate this value until his move South.
We can see Bonnard’s incorporation of the Japanese reliance on color to create a sense of depth into his own work, a vital step in his development as a colorist. In Women With Dog (1891), for example, Bonnard experiments with this concept without entirely abandoning European compositional techniques. Specifically, there is a clear distance between the women and dog in the foreground and the men in the background. A plane is defined by the straight, intersecting lines of the plaid in the central woman’s dress, which capture our attention by the dramatic juxtaposition of white against bright blue. Boundaries of this frontal plain are created with shocks of yellow in the blonde woman’s hair, the dog, and the flowers, which contrast the greens and blues that dominate the rest of the work. Even the women’s skin tones are a brighter pink that seems natural. In contrast, the men, clearly in the background, are duller, painted with colors that seem more reserved. The smaller size of the men is consistent with traditional perspective techniques, but less obviously so than the diagonal lines used in Young Woman at the Piano. Here, Bonnard compensates for lack of three-dimensional modeling techniques like shading and one-point perspective by cropping the front three figures by the edges of the picture on every side, creating a sense of a close-up view. Along the same lines, figures in Japanese prints frequently were cropped in such a manner. By not distracting the viewer with three-dimensional modeling techniques, Bonnard causes us to focus on his use of color in the frontal plane. Color obviously plays a crucial role in the organization of this painting. The use of color as a method of compositional organization was the backbone of his blossoming colorist technique; a pivotal element apparent as early as 1891 in Women With Dog, which was created far before his exposure to the bright light of the South.