Tea Pot and Shell

For five years, from May 1905 to April 1910, Bernard ran a monthly art magazine, La Rénovation esthétique. Sixty issues came out in printings of about 300 copies, produced at his house in Tonnerre in Burgundy on a hand press that his children helped to work, and he wrote most of the contents himself under a string of invented names, arguing for the great tradition of painting against nearly everything the Paris avant-garde was doing. This panel dates from around the month the magazine stopped. On it he put a teapot and a shell, at a fair size for a still life, 68 by 50 centimetres.