Pierre Bonnard

1867-1947

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) was a French painter and printmaker who helped shape the passage from Impressionism into modern art. As a founding member of Les Nabis in Paris in the late 1880s, he absorbed the flat color and pattern of Gauguin's circle and, above all, of Japanese woodblock prints, which taught him unusual viewpoints and bold decorative surfaces. He worked across posters, lithographs, book illustration and decorative panels before settling into the intimate domestic subjects for which he is best known: sunlit interiors, gardens, still lifes of fruit and flowers, and above all his companion and later wife Marthe, painted at table or in the bath for decades. Rather than working directly from the motif, he composed from drawings, notes and memory, building his canvases from small, vibrating strokes of intense, often unnatural color. In his last years, spent in the south of France around Le Cannet, his palette grew even richer; his final painting was finished days before his death. His work is now held in major museums across Europe and the Americas.