The painters
Alexandre Bonin, The Floating Washhouse at Villiers-sur-Morin
Alexandre Bonin owes to his marriage in 1920 to Jeanne Pissarro, known as “Cocotte”, daughter of Camille Pissarro, his place in an artistic genealogy of exceptional density. But it would be unfair to reduce his work to this lineage: a painter of landscapes and river scenes, Bonin brought his own eye to the places he frequented, an eye attentive to the uses of water and to the structures that riverside communities devised in order to live with floods and currents.
The Floating Washhouse at Villiers-sur-Morin (Le bateau-lavoir à Villiers-sur-Morin) is the most direct testimony to this: the floating structure, which the washerwomen of the Brie had adapted to the changing levels of the Grand Morin, fascinated the painter as it had fascinated others before him. The motif of the washhouse, a place of women’s work, of everyday sociability, of gestures handed down from mother to daughter, connects with the concerns of the painters of domestic intimacy who, from Millet to Berthe Morisot, recognised in ordinary tasks the material for painting of a high order. Bonin belongs to this lineage without having sought it: simply by looking at what was there, in front of him, on the banks of the river.
He died in 1943. His work, modest in its declared ambitions but coherent in its sensibility, belongs to those testimonies whose value is measured not by the fame of their author but by the faithfulness of the eye they cast on a place and an era.
These notes draw on a combination of institutional, documentary and local sources: the artist directory of the Musée d’Orsay; the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs (Gründ); art market databases (Artprice, Drouot); the catalogues of the Salon des Artistes français and the Salon d’automne; the Satet-Menon collection relating to the painters of the Grand Morin valley; local sources relating to the Vallée des peintres (the commune of Villiers-sur-Morin, Coulommiers Pays de Brie Tourisme); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Madame Lili Grenier, portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1888); the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (work by Yuzō Saeki).
