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Lot Essay
In an intimate corner of a domestic interior, surrounded—as in a candid snapshot—by the jumbled accoutrements of daily living, a young woman sits with her back to the viewer, a white robe or dressing gown slipping from her shoulders. She is most likely Marthe de Méligny, whom Bonnard met by chance on a Paris street late in 1893; pensive and moody, she became his lifelong companion and muse. “Though Bonnard never called her by her real name [Maria Boursin], never met her real family, she maintained a real presence in his life and inhabited the spaces of his work until the day she died,” Elizabeth Hutton Turner has written. “Her body and the physical closeness of their relationship engaged the painter as no other subject” (Pierre Bonnard, Early and Late, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 60).
During the early years of their life together, Marthe inspired some of the most frankly carnal images of Bonnard’s career. In canvases preceding the turn of the century, she is seen sprawling languorously across the bed in a post-coital tangle of sheets or dressing in the seclusion of the boudoir, nude but for a pair of black stockings. Bonnard’s own presence is implied through a wisp of pipe smoke, for example, or a fleeting glimpse in the mirror, the voyeuristic impulse subsumed into a vision of shared intimacy. “We are made to witness a relationship not between artist and model, but between Pierre and Marthe,” Timothy Hyman has written. “Marthe’s body is affirmed as a vessel of human emotion, holding its full measure of psychological and contemplative significance” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 164).
In the present painting, this overt sexuality gives way to a subtle erotic frisson, now tender and restrained. Marthe’s brown hair, which she typically wore in a modest bowl-shaped cut, is here pinned up informally on her head, revealing the nape of her neck and an expanse of her back. Perhaps she is at her toilette, either preparing to enter the bath or just finished with her ablutions, a theme to which Bonnard would return throughout their life together. Unlike the long series of paintings that the artist would make of a hired studio model in 1905, which appear quite consciously posed, Marthe seems to be caught unaware at a private moment, her head bowed in a posture of self-absorption. A man’s straw boater, which hangs on the wall in the background, provides evidence for the artist, momentarily departed, within this inner sanctum. “Let it be felt that the painter was there,” Bonnard recorded in his journal (quoted in ibid., p. 166).
This hushed and delicate painting dates to an important juncture in Bonnard’s career. As the Nabi group began to disperse in the last years of the century, Bonnard chose to reinvent his art by turning toward the lighter palette and more fragmented touch of Impressionism. “It was as if, having exploited Gauguin’s anti-naturalist and indeed anti-Impressionist principles,” Gloria Groom has written, “Bonnard was now able to appreciate aspects of Impressionism for the first time—especially its nature-derived chromatics, to which he would add a calculated decorative structure. The decorative remained central to his work but the emphasis shifted, as his figures were modeled and liberated by light” (Pierre Bonnard, Observing Nature, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993, p. 97).
During the early years of their life together, Marthe inspired some of the most frankly carnal images of Bonnard’s career. In canvases preceding the turn of the century, she is seen sprawling languorously across the bed in a post-coital tangle of sheets or dressing in the seclusion of the boudoir, nude but for a pair of black stockings. Bonnard’s own presence is implied through a wisp of pipe smoke, for example, or a fleeting glimpse in the mirror, the voyeuristic impulse subsumed into a vision of shared intimacy. “We are made to witness a relationship not between artist and model, but between Pierre and Marthe,” Timothy Hyman has written. “Marthe’s body is affirmed as a vessel of human emotion, holding its full measure of psychological and contemplative significance” (Bonnard, London, 1998, p. 164).
In the present painting, this overt sexuality gives way to a subtle erotic frisson, now tender and restrained. Marthe’s brown hair, which she typically wore in a modest bowl-shaped cut, is here pinned up informally on her head, revealing the nape of her neck and an expanse of her back. Perhaps she is at her toilette, either preparing to enter the bath or just finished with her ablutions, a theme to which Bonnard would return throughout their life together. Unlike the long series of paintings that the artist would make of a hired studio model in 1905, which appear quite consciously posed, Marthe seems to be caught unaware at a private moment, her head bowed in a posture of self-absorption. A man’s straw boater, which hangs on the wall in the background, provides evidence for the artist, momentarily departed, within this inner sanctum. “Let it be felt that the painter was there,” Bonnard recorded in his journal (quoted in ibid., p. 166).
This hushed and delicate painting dates to an important juncture in Bonnard’s career. As the Nabi group began to disperse in the last years of the century, Bonnard chose to reinvent his art by turning toward the lighter palette and more fragmented touch of Impressionism. “It was as if, having exploited Gauguin’s anti-naturalist and indeed anti-Impressionist principles,” Gloria Groom has written, “Bonnard was now able to appreciate aspects of Impressionism for the first time—especially its nature-derived chromatics, to which he would add a calculated decorative structure. The decorative remained central to his work but the emphasis shifted, as his figures were modeled and liberated by light” (Pierre Bonnard, Observing Nature, exh. cat., National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993, p. 97).