After finishing school, Pierre Bonnard enrolled in law school in Paris, then began studying art, first at the Académie Julian in 1887 and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1889. Having lived for a time with his grandmother, he moved into a small apartment close to the Place Clichy. In 1889, he rented a studio in the Batignolles, a working-class district in north-eastern Paris from which he never strayed very far, moving into other studios and apartments around Montmartre over the years.

Bonnard’s experience of urban Paris in the 1890s was stimulated by daily walks during which he observed what he called the ‘theatre of the everyday’. He projected himself into the imagined lives of passers-by, like the flâneur, or stroller, evoked by the poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote in 1863 that ‘modernity is ephemeral, transient, contingent’. Bonnard was introduced by his brother-in-law Claude Terrasse to the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who pioneered cinema in France – their early films also influenced Bonnard’s art at this time.

While studying drawing at the Académie Julian in the late 1880s, Bonnard became friends with fellow students Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Henri-Gabriel Ibels and Paul Ranson. Through Denis, two other artists – Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel – joined the circle, while budding theatre director and actor Aurélien Lugné-Poe and Swiss painter Félix Vallotton widened the group further in the early 1890s.

They formed an artist’s club, encouraging each other to be groundbreaking and transformative in their approach to art, and adopted the name ‘Les Nabis’ from the Hebrew word navi meaning ‘prophet’. The Nabi artists considered themselves the prophets of a new design-based art that would encompass every sphere of modern life – interior design, furniture, fans and textiles, stained glass, and commercial illustration and advertising. They were inspired particularly by Japanese aesthetics and the Japanese reverence for the natural world. From the work of Paul Gauguin, they also took the notion of working with pure, non-mimetic colour, using flat surfaces in service to an idea rather than the imitation of nature.

In 1890 Bonnard’s sister Andrée married Claude Terrasse, a composer and music teacher. He and Terrasse later collaborated on illustrating the latter’s musical primer for children, as well as Terrasse’s musical scores. The following year, Bonnard moved into a studio at 28 rue Pigalle in the ninth arrondissement, which he shared with Maurice Denis, Vuillard and the young actor Aurélien Lugné-Poe. Through Lugné-Poe’s connections, Bonnard became involved in the contemporary experimental theatre scene in Paris.

Lugné-Poe’s friend Paul Fort founded the Théâtre d’Art in 1890, conceived in opposition to the prevailing taste for naturalistic representation in French theatre. Bonnard designed stage sets and playbills for Fort’s Théâtre d’Art productions; and, later, worked for Lugné-Poe’s own theatrical company, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, which staged Alfred Jarry’s controversial play Ubu Roi (King Ubu) in 1896.

Alongside his involvement in music and theatre, Bonnard was an early adopter of photography, buying a roll-film hand Kodak camera soon after it appeared on the market in 1888. Bonnard used his camera mostly as a way of recording joyous family holidays with his sister Andrée and her growing family, at the Bonnard family’s country property near Grenoble. Bonnard later drew on the photographs’ moments of unexpected movement and impromptu composition when composing his paintings.

The exhibition features a soundtrack that has been inspired by the life and times of Pierre Bonnard, featuring music by composers who were in Bonnard’s personal circle of friends and acquaintances, including Maurice Ravel and Claude Terrasse.

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In 1906, Bonnard entered into a selling agreement with the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, owners of a contemporary art gallery in Paris. Now in his late thirties, Bonnard achieved financial prosperity. With significant commissions for the homes of such influential patrons as Misia Godebska or Ivan Morozov, Bonnard united his talent for the decorative with his interest in large-scale easel painting. Like medieval tapestries, these paintings often featured mythological scenes or idealised landscapes, evoking an Arcadian world.

These idealised subjects featured less as Bonnard’s work progressed, and his interest in colour and form took over. It was at this time Bonnard first experienced the light of the south of France, and his palette soon transformed. Simultaneously, his friendship with renowned colourist Henri Matisse influenced his direction, with Bonnard adopting Matisse’s principle, recorded in his 1908 Notes of a Painter, that ‘the work of art must carry within itself its complete significance’.

Two commissions from art critic and collector George Besson depicting contemporary Parisian life demonstrate Bonnard’s success at creating complex pictorial worlds within the frame, independent of their setting. Sensing the significance of his own break from site-specific ‘decorative painting’, Bonnard later remarked that ‘in the future, one will have to know whether one is a painter-decorator or a painter of feeling’. As for himself, he said ‘I float between Intimisme and decoration; one can’t change how one’s made’.

Bonnard’s artistic career is intimately tied to his personal life with Maria Boursin (1869–1942), who chose to be called Marthe de Méligny. The pair met in Montmartre in 1893. De Méligny worked for Trousselier, a company that supplied silk flowers for use in fashionable millinery. Although their different socio-economic backgrounds meant that she was not readily accepted by Bonnard’s family and friends, de Méligny became Bonnard’s lifelong companion and, through her regular presence in his paintings, his close collaborator. Her slim body, soft facial features and wavy hair, often arranged in a high bun or later cut short in a bob, help to identify her in many of Bonnard’s paintings.

In the early years of their relationship, de Méligny was an inspirational model for Bonnard to experiment with erotically charged intimate scenes, in which there is the implication of passion recently spent. Bonnard would often sketch de Méligny in their small apartment near Montmartre, and they also took nude photographs of each other, posed like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, during stays in the countryside.

A highlight of Bonnard’s later career is his many paintings of de Méligny engaged in her ‘toilette’, i.e. dressing, undressing and bathing. No longer imbued with the sexual intensity of their early relationship, Bonnard’s later nudes relate to the art historical tradition of the nude, but also create a new, modern genre related to daily ritual. These nudes introduce a meditative, melancholic monotony that relates, it is understood, to the frequent bathing that de Méligny undertook as part of a regimen for a tubercular illness.

In 1912, there was a major shift in the focus of Bonnard’s work. After renting houses along the Seine each spring for several years, Bonnard purchased a house in Vernonnet, a village on the border between the Île de France and Normandy. With de Méligny he lived here for several months each year until the mid 1930s. They named their house Ma Roulotte, meaning ‘my caravan’.

Bonnard’s painted interiors feature a familiar repertoire of objects that indicate the continuity the painter sought in his surroundings, despite his frequent relocations. Bonnard preferred to paint things he had lived with for a long time, later saying ‘I find it very difficult even to introduce a new object into my still lifes’. These homely objects – such as teapots, baskets and vases – occupy an important place in a complex network of people, animals and things, and suggest the equal importance of animate beings and inanimate objects.

Bonnard dedicated himself to recording his immediate environment – to his pursuit of ‘the transcription of the adventures of the optic nerve’, as he noted in his 1938 notebook. His renewed focus on still lifes and interiors would continue for the rest of his career and become the hallmark of Bonnard’s art.

“During my morning walks I amuse myself by defining different conceptions of landscape – landscape as ‘space’, intimate landscape, decorative landscape, etc. But as for vision, I see things differently every day, the sky, objects, everything changes continually, you can drown in it.
– Pierre Bonnard, letter to Henri Matisse, 1940

The quintessential Pierre Bonnard painting depicts an interior scene and also offers a vista onto the natural world beyond, through a window or open door. Bonnard is credited with inventing a new genre, which some commentators called ‘compound landscapes’, others ‘domestic landscapes’. Frequently incorporating a still life, figures in an interior and a landscape, these complex paintings encourage slow viewing, letting the eye wander across the canvas to take in the many disparate elements. Increasingly, colour becomes the key, unifying each composition.

Domestic landscapes became the focus of Bonnard’s work following his acquisition of Ma Roulotte in Normandy in 1912, increasing as he spent more time in the south of France. In 1926 the Bonnards acquired a small pink villa with a large garden in Le Cannet, on the hillside above Cannes. They called it Le Bosquet, or The Grove, and it was Marthe and Pierre Bonnard’s permanent residence until their respective deaths in 1942 and 1947. The rooms, garden and surrounding landscapes of Le Bosquet provide the setting for many of Bonnard’s late domestic landscapes.

“Colour, the key to each painting.
– Pierre Bonnard, 1934

Bonnard’s art is full of scenes of nature and outdoor life, including farmyards, seascapes and rural vistas. The artist sketched his observations on regular walks wherever he happened to be, whether the Bonnard family property in the Dauphiné region near Grenoble, the various seaside towns he and de Méligny spent their time, or the two houses that most shaped Bonnard’s vision: Ma Roulotte at Vernonnet, in Normandy, and Le Bosquet at Le Cannet, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea near Cannes.

Vernonnet was close to Giverny, where Claude Monet created his late Impressionist masterpieces. Between 1914 and his death in 1926 Monet painted around forty large-scale panels of his garden around the lily ponds, which he described as his grandes décorations. Monet’s creation of his great late works was possibly influenced by dialogue with younger painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard, who both visited Giverny. In return, the older artist’s radical experimentation influenced Bonnard. He soon replaced the dark colours common in his early works with lighter, fresher tones. Verdant riparian landscapes began to fill his canvases. Sometimes, the small figure of a woman, camouflaged among the vegetation, can be discovered in the scene, providing scale and a sense of proximity to home.

“In the light of the Midi, everything is illuminated and the painting vibrates.
– Pierre Bonnard, 1946

Bonnard became fully aware of the aesthetic power of ‘le Midi’ (the south of France) after 1906 and several visits to the region in the company of painters Paul Signac, Henri Manguin and Henri Matisse. Writing to his mother following his 1909 visit, Bonnard had enthused: ‘I felt as if I were in the palace of A Thousand and One Nights; the sea, the yellow walls, reflections as colourful as the lights themselves’.

When Pierre and Marthe Bonnard moved into their house in Le Cannet in 1927, Bonnard was sixty years old. He practised a daily routine of early morning walks along nearby paths overlooking the terracotta-tiled roofs of the town of Le Cannet and beyond to coastline. He made notes and sketched with pencil and gouache while ‘on location’, including still lifes on the dining room table, nudes in the bathroom and self-portraits in the bathroom mirror. But Bonnard painted his canvases from memory, and their forms and colours built up over time. At Le Bosquet, he worked in a studio added to the northern side of the house, with large windows facing the garden and the mimosa or wattle that burst into colour each spring.