It was in this plain room that he made some of the most affecting colour inventions in the history of French painting. Here he set to work on the memories he had gathered – the epiphanies, so to speak, for which he went fishing on the canal each morning. He pinned his canvases to the wall and worked on them unstretched The pinholes are still there in the raw plaster. The Villa du Bosquet is not only a memorial to a dead man but a dead place: a Riviera through which people walked rather than drove.Bonnard’s only addition to the house was a small, cramped, split-level, north-facing studio. He once told an interviewer that too well-appointed or beautiful a studio, like that of his friend Matisse in Vence, would have “intimidated” him.

The Canal de la Sciagne, along which he used to walk each morning into the village which is no longer a village, is now just a great black pipe carrying water along a narrow service road running between high evergreen hedges grown to preserve the privacy of each precious plot of land. Most of the old houses, not just along the Boulevard Carnot but throughout the whole area, have been knocked down to make way for immeubles – apartment blocks – or for millionaires’ villas with swimming pools in their grounds. The scent of mimosa, jasmine, orange blossom and pine has been replaced by the acrid smell of chlorine. I must have seen them a thousand times and they never said a thing to me. But last night it rained and they are shining with a brilliance I have never seen before.’ He took a little piece of paper out of his pocket and he made a sketch, and later he painted a picture from it That was how he worked. He painted nature always from memory, after his walks.”Goats no longer wander through olive groves above the house, as they did in Bonnard’s day There are no olive groves left either Much, indeed, has changed in Le Cannet since the war. One morning, we were walking along the canal, with this wonderful view of Le Cannet, with Cannes below and far away, in the blue distance, the mountains of L’Estorel.

Almost every exploitable inch of the hillside on which Le Cannet stood has been developed. The old village church, Sainte Philomene, still stands but it is kept locked and the Vatican recently declared that Sainte Philomene has been struck off the list of official saints – a desanctification which seems somehow appropriate to Le Cannet as a whole. What was once a village, high above Cannes and separated from it by an expanse of open country, is now merely part of the urban sprawl of the Cote d’Azur. We came to an olive grove and he stopped and said to me, ‘Look, Michel, look at those trees. Each morning, the painter performed the same ritual: “Before breakfast, he would drink a very large glass of cold water Then he would go for a walk. He would take the path up behind the house to the little canal, the Canal de la Sciagne, and walk along it Il faisait provision de la vie – he was stocking up on life I had the privilege of walking with him sometimes… Although none of Bonnard’s pictures hangs there, the house, half a century after his death, still contains traces of him and some lessons about the nature of his art.Monsieur Terrasse remembers visiting Bonnard at the house when he was 14 years old and his great-uncle was nearly 80.

He would walk slowly, with a certain kind of lazy attention, because he didn’t want to miss anything that might present itself to him. He speaks a mellifluent and splendidly rhetorical French and his passion for Bonnard is matched, it would seem, only by his scorn for art critics with elaborate pet theories about the meanings of his pictures. In conversation, he often quotes his great-uncle Pierre’s remark, apropos pet theories in general: “C’est bon d’enfourcher un dada, mais ne pas croire que ce soit Pegase” – which may roughly be translated as: “Feel free to get up on your hobby horse, but don’t mistake it for Pegasus.” His own hobby horse is the importance of preserving the Villa du Bosquet. “If Bonnard were to come back to Cannes,” he says, “he would not recognise the train station, which has been put underground; he would not recognise the Boulevard Carnot up to Le Cannet because it is lined with apartment blocks; he would not recognise Le Cannet because most of the old houses with their orange-tiled roofs have been pulled down.

But…” and here he pauses and suddenly smiles an enormous childish smile, “just imagine the surprise he would feel, this wonderful man, this great artist, when he saw that he could still climb the stairs up into his garden and find his house exactly as he left it.”Monsieur Terrasse wears a formal shirt and loosely knotted bow-tie and chain-smokes unfiltered Gauloises from a gold and green enamel cigarette holder. The Piranesi print of ruined Roman antiquities which once was simply pinned to the wall in Bonnard’s bedroom has now been framed; and a new bedstead has been bought to replace the stolen one – although the replacement has shiny brass knobs on it, a departure from the Franciscan simplicity of Bonnard’s own bedstead which Monsieur Terrasse now deeply regrets.Otherwise, he is, it is clear, intensely proud of the house, which he recently succeeded in getting listed as an important historical monument. A local estate agent affirmed the developer’s good reputation, and her surveyor deemed the building work satisfactory. “By this point I was desperate.”Her first rainy day revealed that her conservatory flashing was a curate’s egg – it kept out half the water. The half that entered did so through more than 20 points of entry, and water coursed down the width of the entire wall. The culprit was leading that looked like lead but was really plastic.Other minor flaws were readily dispatched by her trusty handyman, and she soon made peace with her property “In a different town, I really could have come a cropper I gambled, but I knew the area very well I decided it was worth taking a risk.