"Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.", Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard (October 3, 1867 – January 23, 1947) was a French painter, printmaker, and one of the founding members of the Nabis. Born in Fontenay-aux-Roses outside Paris, he initially studied law to satisfy his family before enrolling at the Académie Julian, where he met Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Henri Ibels, and Paul Ranson, the painters with whom he would form the Nabis circle in 1888. His lifelong friend Édouard Vuillard joined the group shortly after. The early Nabis years produced his decorative panels, theatre programs and posters, and the Japanese-prints-influenced compositions that earned him the nickname "Nabi très japonard."
His mature painting moved increasingly toward intimate domestic subjects, interiors, dining tables, nudes in baths, gardens, and views from windows, handled in a saturated, layered colour register that has made him widely regarded as one of the great colorists of modern European painting. His wife Marthe, whom he met in 1893 and married in 1925, served as his most frequent model across more than four decades, particularly in the long sequence of bath and bathroom paintings of his late career. In 1926 the couple bought Le Bosquet, a small house in Le Cannet on the French Riviera, where Bonnard would paint nearly three hundred works over the next two decades. His paintings are held in the Musée d'Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée Bonnard at Le Cannet (opened 2011 and dedicated entirely to his work), and essentially every other major collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European art.