Board decorated with tendrils and flowers

This is carved and painted wood rather than canvas, a long narrow strip 99 centimetres across and only 17 high. Painters of Bernard's generation in France moved easily between pictures and objects. Around 1900 furniture, screens, mirror frames and panels were ordinary work for them, and Bernard designed and decorated furniture of his own. He cut this one in 1906, by which time he had settled at Tonnerre in Burgundy and was spending part of each year in Paris. A strip of that shape is an element of something larger, not a picture for a wall. The museum also keeps a mirror frame he carved two years later, worked with plants, flowers and two female figures.