Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, born near Paris in 1867, who died at Le Cannet in the south of France in 1947. He belonged to the Nabis, a group of young Paris painters of the 1890s, and spent his life painting rooms, tables and gardens in glowing color. He is best known for his wife Marthe, whom he painted hundreds of times, very often in the bath.
Almost every picture Bonnard made was a picture he kept working on after it was finished. The woman in the bath is the one people remember, and she is also the one the stories get wrong.
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Bonnard could not leave a painting alone. Sarah Whitfield, who wrote the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art's Bonnard exhibition of 1998, describes him using friends to distract the guards in museums, or turning up at collectors' houses with a small paintbox in his pocket.
In the best-known version he is arrested at the Louvre, brush in hand, shouting that the picture is his. Most historians treat that scene as a myth. The habit behind it is real.
The woman in those baths is usually introduced as Marthe de Méligny, an orphan of noble Italian family who fell ill and spent her days in the tub while her husband painted what he saw. Several parts of that story do not hold up. Her real name was Maria Boursin. And the bath paintings begin years before she withdrew from other people.
The man who painted her started somewhere else entirely, in a law office.
What You'll Discover
Why a lawyer joined the prophets.
Who Marthe really was.
What followed the wedding a month later.
Why he painted without looking.
What he asked his nephew to change.