1890 -1947 · Memory, color and familiar everyday life

Dining room, bedroom, bath and window become fields of color at Bonnard where familiar life mixes with the garden, memories and light.

Pierre Bonnard paints the places he knows to the point of transforming them into memory experiences. From the Nabi period, the table, the bedroom and the toilet allowed him to explore Japanese framing, flat areas and the discreet presence of loved ones. Marthe de Méligny, his partner then his wife, crosses these spaces without always being their visible center: she appears in a mirror, near a window or almost absorbed by color. In Vernonnet then in Le Cannet, Bonnard often draws the motif in small notebooks before slowly developing the painting in the workshop. The interior is therefore not copied on site; it is reconstructed by sensation. In late dining rooms, table, fruit, cat, window and garden respond to each other in chromatic echoes. A door or a bay no longer really separates the inside from the outside. This instability makes the rooms come alive: the objects change scale, the edges cut off the figures and the light seems to circulate throughout the canvas. The "Interior by Pierre Bonnard" selection notably compares the Dining Room with the garden and the dressing table with mirror. Its reading favors composition.

Bonnard inhabits painting like a house of memory: each table, window and color returns transformed by time.