Nude in the Bath

“Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly” said Pierre Bonnard, the author of today’s painting.

Bonnard’s model for Nude in the Bath was Marthe de Méligny, formerly Maria Boursin (1869–1942), who was the artist’s companion from 1893 until her death. The couple married in 1925, the year from which this painting dates. Bonnard painted Marthe over 300 times during the course of his career, and many of these images show her preparing for, immersed in, or emerging from the bath. The motif of the bathing woman can be understood not only in terms of the artist’s fascination with Marthe as a subject, but in the context of her health, as she took frequent baths as part of the treatment for a tubercular condition.

This Nude in the Bath is the last of Bonnard's treatments of this subject; it is one of the great nudes of the twentieth century. The audacity of color that characterizes the artist's mature work is evident in this painting's dazzling mosaic of oranges, yellows, pinks, blues, violets, and greens. The originality of Bonnard's chromatic daring is nearly equal in this painting by a pictorial construct in which perspective and volume are denied and forms are piled up to hover over the flat plane of the canvas. Bonnard transformed this domestic environment, with its comfortably curled-up family dachshund, into an exotic setting in which a young woman floats in a pearly tub, her flesh reflecting the opalescent colors that surround her. The result is a sensual, dreamlike, and private evocation.