Pierre Bonnard: The Complete Story
Pierre Bonnard was the French painter who turned ordinary domestic life into a blaze of colour. A breakfast table, a sunlit garden, a woman in the bath, all glow under his orange, violet and gold. He worked from memory and notes rather than from life, building scenes from feeling, and one model, his wife Marthe, appears in his work hundreds of times.
He loved his finished paintings so little that he once sneaked into a museum to keep retouching one.
Born: Fontenay aux Roses, France, 1867
Known for: intimate domestic scenes, intense colour, the Nabis
Died: Le Cannet, France, 1947
The everyday set on fire
Bonnard painted what was around him: meals, rooms, gardens, pets, his wife. Nothing dramatic happens, yet the colour is almost overwhelming, warm light pouring across a tablecloth or a tiled floor until the scene glows. See what is post-impressionism.
He is often called an intimiste, a painter of intimate private life. The subjects are humble, the colour anything but.
The Nabis and the flat bright world
As a young man Bonnard joined the Nabis, a group inspired by Gauguin who treated a painting as a flat surface covered in colours in a certain order. They loved pattern, decoration and strong flat shapes. See what is oil painting.
Bonnard kept that love of pattern all his life. Wallpaper, tablecloths and tiles dissolve into glowing fields of colour, so the whole canvas vibrates at once.
Painting from memory
Unlike the Impressionists racing to catch a passing moment outdoors, Bonnard worked slowly in the studio from small sketches and memory. He wanted the remembered feeling of a scene, not a snapshot of it.
He pinned unstretched canvas straight to the wall and worked on several at once, adding touches over months. The freshness is built, not caught.
Marthe, painted for forty years
His wife Marthe is the constant of his art, painted again and again, very often in the bath. Over the decades she appears hundreds of times, ageless, as if frozen at the moment they met.
She was reclusive and unwell, and their life together was private and strange. The bathtub paintings, glowing and tender, are among the most haunting images of married love in modern art.
Pierre Bonnard, common questions
What is Pierre Bonnard famous for?
Intimate, intensely coloured scenes of domestic life, and his many paintings of his wife Marthe.
What were the Nabis?
A group inspired by Gauguin who treated painting as flat colour and pattern rather than realism.
Did he paint from life?
No, he worked from memory and small notes in the studio, often over many months.
When did he die?
In 1947, in the south of France.
Why the colour still glows
Bonnard was once dismissed as a mere decorator, too pretty, too domestic. The verdict has reversed completely. Major museums now build blockbuster shows around him, and his glowing rooms are seen as a high point of twentieth century colour.
One last detail. He was so unhappy with a painting already hanging in a Paris museum that he distracted a guard while a friend kept watch, took out a small box of paints, and quietly improved it on the wall. He simply could not leave his pictures alone.