Municipal Guard (Garde municipal)
Pierre Bonnard
French, 1867–1947
1893
A loose lithograph by Pierre Bonnard from 1893 that captures a fleeting street vignette—two municipal guards walking before a mounted rider—translating the artist’s painterly touch into print.
What stops you is the economy of the drawing: sparing, sketch-like black marks and smudges that define two small cloaked figures and a larger rider and horse against a great expanse of blank paper, giving the scene a quick, atmospheric feeling.
Produced during Bonnard’s Nabi period, the print demonstrates how artists of the late 19th century used lithography to carry the intimacy, spontaneity, and decorative sensibility of modern painting into printmaking, widening its expressive possibilities.
Medium
Lithograph
Dimensions
composition: 9 15/16 x 6 1/2" (25.3 x 16.5 cm); sheet: 14 15/16 x 11 1/8" (38 x 28.3 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Accession
3.1947.2
Palette
Exhibitions
