Bonnard's painting works at the seam between observation and memory, he typically painted at home from notes and sketches rather than from the motif, allowing the colour and atmosphere of a remembered moment to settle into the canvas, and the body of work he produced over fifty years is among the most distinctive contributions to twentieth-century European colour painting.
Bonnard came to art against family expectation. The Fontenay-aux-Roses household pushed him toward the law, and he completed his legal studies and a brief period as a working lawyer before the Académie Julian and the friendships with Sérusier and Denis convinced him to commit fully to painting. The 1888 founding of the Nabis, the small group of younger painters who took their name from the Hebrew word for "prophet" and organized themselves around Sérusier's Talisman, the small panel he had painted in Brittany under Gauguin's direct instruction, placed him at the centre of one of the most generative moments in late nineteenth-century French painting.
The Nabis decade produced his earliest mature work. The decorative panels for private patrons, the theatre posters and programs (including the famous design for La Revue Blanche), the lithographic suites, and the close domestic interiors of his Parisian and Norman household subjects all belong to this period. His engagement with Japanese woodblock prints, then newly available in Paris through the Bing and Hayashi galleries, gave his early work the flat, decorative compositional logic for which the Nabis as a whole became known.
His meeting with Marthe in 1893 was the central biographical event of the rest of his life. She moved into his Paris apartment shortly afterward, sat for the long sequence of intimate paintings that would run through his career, and married him in 1925. Her health was fragile, she suffered from a tubercular condition that increasingly required warm climates, and the move to Le Bosquet was made primarily on her account.
The Le Cannet years of his late career produced his most fully realized work. The house, the small garden, the dining table, the bathroom in which Marthe spent long hours bathing, and the views down the Mediterranean coast became the immediate subject of nearly all his paintings, and the increasingly saturated, almost incandescent colour of these late canvases has been the basis of his current reputation. He worked from sketches, notes, and memory rather than directly from the motif, returning to canvases over months or years and adjusting their colour relationships in long campaigns of revision.
Marthe died in 1942 during the German occupation, and the war years saw Bonnard largely confined to Le Bosquet. He continued to paint until his death in 1947, leaving behind a body of late paintings that has only grown in critical estimation since.