Pierre Bonnard, The White Cupboard, 1931–32

Pierre Bonnard was a mature artist in the fifth decade of his career when he painted The White Cupboard. A sizable picture measuring more than four feet tall by three feet wide, it appears, at first glance, to record a simple domestic scene: a woman arranging dishware in a dining room cabinet. The setting is Le Bosquet (French for “The Grove”), Bonnard’s hilltop property in the village of Le Cannet. Located near Cannes in southern France, Le Cannet was much quieter than its flashy neighbor in the early twentieth century. Fewer than seven thousand people inhabited Le Cannet when Bonnard purchased a house there in 1926, compared to more than forty-two thousand living in Cannes.¹ An early twentieth-century postcard offers a general view of Le Cannet, with its historic Church of Sainte-Catherine in the left foreground and private dwellings scattered among the highlands (Fig. 1).² Like many of the homes seen here, Bonnard’s villa overlooked the Esterel mountains, which he painted on several occasions.³ Although Le Bosquet was not the artist’s sole residence—he also owned real estate in Vernonnet and maintained both a studio and an apartment in Paris—he spent the majority of his time in Le Cannet from the late 1920s onward, as evidenced by his creative output. By one scholar’s tally, Bonnard produced 217 oil paintings and fifty-nine gouaches of his beloved Le Bosquet.⁴

The female figure in the Nelson-Atkins work is Bonnard’s wife and model, Marthe de Méligny (née Maria Boursin, 1869–1942).⁵ Born near Bourges in central France to a working-class family, she moved to Paris in the late 1880s with her mother and two older sisters and sought employment in the artificial flower trade. It is often reported that Marthe met Bonnard while peddling flowers on the Boulevard Haussmann,⁶ but the precise circumstances of both their first encounter and Marthe’s job are unknown; like many fleuristes, Marthe may have been a factory worker producing artificial blooms for the millinery industry.⁷ In any case, Marthe and Bonnard crossed paths around 1893, when she began appearing in the artist’s paintings and journal entries, but—contrary to popular belief—they did not form a lifelong attachment straightaway.⁸ As Lucy Whelan revealed, Marthe married another man sometime before 1899. Little is known of their union, but it seems to have fizzled by 1905–07, when Marthe resurfaced in Bonnard’s pictures and diaries. For the next three and a half decades, she was his near-constant companion. They wed belatedly in 1925, perhaps after the death or divorce of Marthe’s first husband.⁹

Bonnard’s colleague Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940) undertook a bust-length portrait of Marthe in the late 1890s (Fig. 2). Fashionably dressed in Belle Époque attire, she gazes inscrutably at the viewer—a rare instance of direct address for a woman who usually averts her eyes or turns her back squarely on the beholder in Bonnard’s representations, including The White Cupboard. Bonnard’s tendency to hide his wife’s facial features probably reflects both their fraught relationship¹⁰ and Marthe’s reclusive personality, which may have stemmed in part from health issues.¹¹ As Marthe grew older, she reportedly rebuffed the company of all but Bonnard. In a January 1932 letter to Maurice Denis (1870–1943), Bonnard described his wife as “a complete misanthrope” and expressed regret that his travel and social activities were increasingly circumscribed by her desire to avoid human contact.¹² Nevertheless, Bonnard remained devoted to Marthe and was devastated by her death in 1942.¹³ He portrayed her more frequently and in a greater variety of media than any other acquaintance.¹⁴

One might assume, given the personal subject and setting of the Kansas City work, that Bonnard executed it sur le motif, but this working method did not appeal to him. In an oft-quoted statement, Bonnard explained that “the presence of the object, the motif, is very cramping for the painter at the moment of painting” and could cause him “to lose the initial idea.”¹⁵ It was better, in his opinion, to make daily sketches of interesting objects or arrangements and then use those drawings as source material for paintings, often weeks or months after the fact. Bonnard also preferred to record these drawings in journals, rather than traditional sketchbooks, with the result that each one bears a precise date—a boon for art historians, since Bonnard rarely dated his paintings after 1900.¹⁶ The White Cupboard, which is signed but undated, has traditionally been assigned a date of 1931 or 1933. French art critic George Besson, who knew Bonnard well, dated the picture to 1933 in his monograph on the painter, probably because it was first exhibited in that year, and many scholars have followed his lead.¹⁷ However, Jean and Henry Dauberville dated the work to 1931 in their catalogue raisonné of Bonnard’s oeuvre,¹⁸ and the painting’s stretcher, which conservation staff believe to be original, bears the cursive inscription “Placard Cannet 31” (Cupboard Cannet 31).¹⁹

Fortunately, Bonnard’s daybooks shed some light on the matter. Two drawings from November 17 and 19, 1931, depict the dining room cupboard at Le Bosquet open wide to reveal empty interior shelves. In the first sketch, there is no indication of lighting conditions, nor any attempt to create an illusion of depth. In the second sketch, reproduced here (Fig. 3), Bonnard darkened the right side of the cupboard, suggesting deep shadows from an overhead light source, as we see in The White Cupboard. Six weeks later, Bonnard ushered in the New Year with a full-page drawing on January 1–2, 1932 (Fig. 4). It portrays the lower part of the dining room cabinet (where the doors are solid wood rather than mullioned), a basket filled with edibles, and a piece of fruit resting on a flat surface. The disposition of these various elements closely resembles the bottom half of the Nelson-Atkins picture; indeed, Bonnard’s drawing might be considered a partial compositional sketch. The lone piece of produce in the center foreground is a particularly idiosyncratic detail common to both works. Other drawings to which Bonnard may have turned when painting The White Cupboard include a January 4, 1932, sketch of a brimming basket and a December 16–17, 1932, sketch of a woman organizing items in the dining room cupboard, with her back to the viewer.²⁰ Taken together, these daybook entries suggest that Bonnard began developing The White Cupboard in late 1931, refined his ideas in early 1932, and possibly continued working on the painting toward the end of that year. For this reason, the Kansas City work can be dated to 1931–32.

Like the sketches on which The White Cupboard is based, the painting shows a narrow slice of the dining room at Le Bosquet. A large space, it was originally two smaller rooms, but Bonnard removed the partition between them when he purchased the home.²¹ He also painted the walls Naples yellow, the same color as Marthe’s bedroom, and installed casement windows with an optimal view of the garden.²² The windows are not visible in the Nelson-Atkins picture, but the earthy yellow pigment is evident in the upper left and right margins of the canvas, above the fireplace and on the wall perpendicular to the cabinet. Marthe wears a sweater of the same hue, such that she becomes part of the decorative schema. Bonnard’s warm palette of yellows and reds is typical of his southern landscapes and interior scenes, whereas his paintings of northern France are often characterized by cooler tones.²³ A watercolor and gouache drawing by Bonnard at the British Museum offers a broader view of the same dining area at Le Bosquet, helping to better orient the viewer, and Marthe, within the room (Fig. 5).²⁴

The tight framing of the Kansas City picture focuses attention on Marthe and her prosaic household chore. Although the activity of organizing tableware necessarily involves some degree of movement, the scene is characterized by an unnatural stillness; Marthe seems frozen in place. She forecloses any possibility of intimacy by turning away from viewers, either unaware of or determinedly ignoring our presence. This emotional disconnect must have appealed to Bonnard, because an individual seen from behind was one of his favorite figural conventions. More than seventy paintings in the Dauberville catalogue raisonné contain one or more people with their backs to the viewer.²⁵ An early example is The Inspection (1890; private collection), which features a dozen French troops standing at attention. One row of soldiers faces the beholder, but a second row faces the opposite direction.²⁶ In other pictures, we see women doing laundry²⁷ or examining their reflection in a mirror,²⁸ men shopping at a flea market,²⁹ city-dwellers strolling the streets of Paris³⁰—all with their backs to us. Bonnard was particularly fond of portraying female figures from behind. Time and time again, Marthe and other women in his orbit avoid a confrontation with the outside world by physically spurning its gaze.³¹

Although Bonnard often represented Marthe as aloof or withdrawn, critics failed to notice her detachment in The White Cupboard when the painting debuted at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune’s 1933 retrospective on the artist. Most reviewers interpreted Bonnard’s paintings as evocations of contented domesticity. Armand Dayot described the many dining room and washroom scenes in the exhibition as images of private life, “simple and everyday, but invariably happy.”³² Art historian Waldemar George went further. He construed Bonnard’s female figures not as representations of specific people but as emblems of French bourgeois womanhood:

The women whom Bonnard paints exude that nurturing calm and douceur de vivre [sweetness of life] so characteristic of French culture. The work and play of these young housewives consist of arranging flowers or decorating the table. Bonnard’s smiling heroines are the guardian angels of the households which they imbue with their real presence. Their homes are made in their image.³³

George’s nationalistic reading is hard to reconcile with The White Cupboard, which he illustrated in his article. Marthe is the inverse of a “smiling heroine,” and the dining room at Le Bosquet is suffused with the artist’s spirit as much as his wife’s. It was Bonnard, after all, who oversaw the room’s renovation and selected its palette. Nevertheless, Dayot and George’s notion of Bonnard as someone who painted joyful scenes of daily life persisted for decades in the scholarship on the artist—Claude Roger-Marx famously dubbed Bonnard the “painter of happiness” in 1956³⁴—and it is only recently that this idea has been debunked.

Today, Le Bosquet is recognized as a historic monument by the French government. Still in the hands of Bonnard’s descendants, who have scrupulously restored the home to its original state,³⁵ it stands as testament to an artist who produced some of his most inventive and psychologically complex paintings of domestic life there, including The White Cupboard.

Notes

1. For census data, see Claude Motte and Marie-Christine Vouloir, “Le Cannet” and “Cannes,” Des villages de Cassini aux communes d’aujourd’hui, Laboratoire de démographie historique, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, accessed November 8, 2022, http://cassini.ehess.fr/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=6809 and http://cassini.ehess.fr/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=6809. Le Cannet had 6,244 residents in 1926, whereas Cannes boasted 42,427.

2. This postcard bears the insignia of ND Phot., a Parisian publishing house founded as Neurdein Frères around 1885 and renamed ND Phot. in 1906. See “Neurdein Frères / Neurdein et Cie / ND Phot.,” Dumbarton Oaks Archives, accessed November 8, 2022, https://www.doaks.org/research/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/collections/ephemera/names/nd-phot.

3. See, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Landscape at Le Cannet, 1928, oil on canvas, 50 3/8 x 109 1/2 in. (128 x 278.2 cm), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, AP 2018.01, https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-201801.

4. Michel Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, trans. Sebastien Wormell (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 121.

5. The timing of and motivation for Marthe’s name change are unclear. Tradition has it that Marthe introduced herself to Bonnard as “Marthe de Méligny” when they first met, but Lucy Whelan casts doubt on this long-held assumption; see Lucy Whelan, “New Light on Pierre Bonnard’s Wife and Model Marthe,” Burlington Magazine 162, no. 1406 (May 2020): 417–18. According to Marthe’s great-niece Pierrette Vernon, Marthe’s adopted surname probably derives from a village in the Cher department called Méligny, close to where Marthe grew up. See Sarah Whitfield, “Fragments of an Identical World,” in Sarah Whitfield and John Elderfield, Bonnard, exh. cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 30n41. Due to this complex history, scholars refer to Bonnard’s wife simply as “Marthe” in the literature on him; I have followed their lead.

6. See, for example, William D. Montalbano, “A Brush With, or Without, Greatness?” Los Angeles Times (March 21, 1998): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-21-ca-31063-story.html; and Alastair Sooke, “In the Bath with Mrs. Bonnard: How the Painter’s Difficult Marriage Inspired His Art,” Telegraph (January 20, 2019): https:www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/bath-mrs-bonnard-painters-difficult-marriage-inspired-spellbinding/.

7. Whelan, “New Light,” 413.

8. Whitfield’s statement that “at the age of twenty-six, Bonnard decided to make his life with Marthe” is typical of the scholarship on the artist. See Whitfield, “Fragments of an Identical World,” 15.

9. Whelan, “New Light,” 414–16, 418.

10. Bonnard supposedly had affairs with two of his models, Lucienne Dupuy de Fenelle and Renée Montchaty, while in a relationship with Marthe; see Véronique Serrano, “He Who Sings is Not Always Happy,” in Matthew Gale, ed., The C C Land Exhibition: Pierre Bonnard; The Colour of Memory, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2019), 35. He also forged Marthe’s will in order to retain full possession of their shared estate, leading to a decades-long inheritance struggle after his own death; see Sarah Whitfield, “A Question of Belonging,” in Pierre Bonnard: The Work of Art; Suspending Time (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2006), 65.

11. Marthe suffered from respiratory problems, possibly due to the long hours she worked as a fleuriste. The adhesive pastes and gases used to make artificial flowers were known to cause health issues. See Whelan, “New Light,” 413, 417; Octave Uzanne, Parisiennes de ce temps: En leurs divers milieux, états et conditions (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), 159–60; and Mary Van Kleeck, Artificial Flower Makers (New York: Survey Associates, 1913), 153.

12. Quoted in Jacqueline Munck, “‘The Cat Drank All the Milk!’: Bonnard’s Continuous Present,” in Dita Amory, ed., Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 63. Similarly, in 1931 Bonnard rescinded an invitation to George Besson to visit him at Le Bosquet due to Marthe’s mental health. See Chantal Duverget, George Besson, 1882–1971: Itinéraire d’un passeur d’art (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2012), 98–100. These incidents notwithstanding, some Bonnard experts believe reports of Marthe’s antisocial behavior to be overblown. Whelan argues that Marthe’s reputation as a recluse derives largely from the inheritance dispute between Bonnard’s descendants and Marthe’s heirs, in which the former presented Marthe as “a strange and secretive individual”—a legal strategy that ultimately helped win their case. See Whelan, “New Light,” 417.

13. When Bonnard informed Henri Matisse (1869–1954) of Marthe’s passing, his heavy emotions were evident: “You can imagine my grief and my solitude, filled with bitterness and worry about the life I may be leading from now on.” Quoted in Antoine Terrasse, ed., Bonnard/Matisse: Letters between Friends, 1925–1946, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 101.

14. As Bonnard’s great-nephew observed, Bonnard recorded Marthe’s likeness in drawings, paintings, engravings, photographs, and even sculpture. See Antoine Terrasse, “A World Devoted to the Feminine,” in Guy Cogeval and Isabelle Cahn, Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2016), 206.

15. Quoted in Michael Harrison and Judith Kimmelman, eds., Drawings by Bonnard, exh. cat. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1984), 7.

16. Whitfield and Elderfield, Bonnard, 53.

17. See George Besson, Bonnard (Paris: Éditions Braun, 1934), unpaginated; François-Joachim Beer, Pierre Bonnard (Marseille: Éditions Françaises d’Art, 1947), 103; Raymond Cogniat, Bonnard (Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1950), 38; and Bonnard, exh. cat. (Geneva: Galerie Krugier, 1969), 26.

18. Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bonnard: Catalogue Raisonné de l’Œuvre Peint (Paris: Éditions Bernheim-Jeune, 1973), no. 1476, p. 3:375.

19. For more on the stretcher, see Scott Heffley, “Painting Report of Examination,” June 5, 2015, NAMA conservation file. The French term “cannet” can also refer to a cabinet or swing gate with open grillwork.

20. In the latter, the woman is slightly hunched, and her head is turned away from the cabinet, whereas in The White Cupboard Marthe stands erect and faces the shelves. Nevertheless, the drawing is compositionally similar to the Nelson-Atkins work. See Pierre Bonnard, entries for January 4 and December 16–17, 1932, Agenda 1932, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. I am grateful to Danielle Hampton Cullen, project assistant, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, for identifying these and other sketches.

21. Doric pilasters replaced the original partition. See “The Bosquet: The House of Pierre Bonnard,” virtual visit, Le Musée Bonnard, accessed March 14, 2023, http://www.museebonnard.fr/index.php/fr/ressources/pedagogiques/133-visites-virtuelles-documentaires.

22. Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, 13–14.

23. For Bonnard’s contrasting palette in northern and southern locales, see Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard (London: Phaidon, 1994), 116–63; and Nicholas Watkins, Interpreting Bonnard: Color and Light, exh. cat. (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1998), 63.

24. Had Bonnard widened his viewing angle still further, one would have seen a framed lithograph of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841–1919) Pinning the Hat hanging kitty-corner from the cupboard, evidence of the two artists’ longstanding friendship. The Renoir print is visible in period photographs of the dining room, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Bonnard at Home, Le Cannet, 1944, gelatin silver print, 7 1/16 x 10 9/16 in. (17.9 x 26.9 cm), Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, reproduced in Richard R. Brettell and Joachim Pissarro, Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 149.

25. I thank Pegeen Blank, volunteer, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, for her assistance with this tally.

26. See Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale (New York: Christie’s, November 11, 2019), lot 10A, La Revue or L’Exercice, https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-pierre-bonnard-la-revue-ou-lexercice-6233778.

27. See Modern Day Auction (New York: Sotheby’s, November 17, 2021), lot 341, Femme étendant du linge, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/ modern-day-auction/femme-etendant-du-linge.

28. See Pierre Bonnard, Dame vor dem Spiegel, ca. 1905, oil on canvas, 20 5/8 x 14 7/8 in. (52.4 x 37.8 cm), Neue Pinakothek, Munich, inv. no. 8665, https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/en/artwork/ Pdxz0XVGw5/pierre-bonnard/dame-vor-dem-spiegel.

29. See Art impressionniste et moderne (Paris: Christie’s, December 2, 2008), lot 11, Dans la rue (La Devanture), https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5147251.

30. See Pierre Bonnard, Place Pigalle at Night, ca. 1905–08, oil on panel, 22 5/8 x 26 15/16 in. (57.5 x 68.4 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1955.23.1, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/9808.

31. For two examples of Marthe posed in this manner, see Pierre Bonnard, The Yellow Shawl, ca. 1925, oil on canvas, 50 1/4 x 37 3/4 in. (127.6 x 95.9 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 2006.140.1, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/112769; and Pierre Bonnard, Coin de salle à manger au Cannet, ca. 1932, oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 35 7/16 in. (81 x 90 cm), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 1977 64, https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/coin-de-salle-manger-au-cannet-69573.

32. A[rmand] D[ayot], “Les expositions: Deux expositions de Pierre Bonnard,” L’Art et les artistes 26, no. 139 (July 1933): 351. Per Dayot, the pictures represented “la vie simple, quotidienne, mais immuablement heureuse.” This and subsequent translations by Brigid M. Boyle.

33. W[aldemar] G[eorge], “Défense et illustration de la bourgeoisie française: Bonnard et la douceur de vivre,” Formes, no. 33 (1933): 381. “Les femmes que peint Bonnard répandent autour d’elles ce calme bienfaisant et cette douceur de vivre qui sont les attributs de la culture française. Les travaux et les jeux de ces jeunes bourgeoises consistent à arranger les fleurs ou à garnir une table. Les souriantes héroïnes de Bonnard sont les anges-gardiens des foyers qu’elles imprègnent de leur présence réelle. Leurs intérieurs sont faits à leur image.”

34. Claude Roger-Marx, “Bonnard, peintre du bonheur,” Illustration, no. 23 (March 1956): 73–81.

35. After Bonnard’s death, a lengthy legal battle ensued between his heirs and those of Marthe (see note 10), and Le Bosquet fell into a state of disrepair. It was not until 1968 that Jean-Jacques Terrasse, the artist’s great-nephew, purchased the property at auction and set about restoring it. See Terrasse, Bonnard at Le Cannet, 27–31.

The White Cupboard exemplifies the later practice of Pierre Bonnard, in which composition, materials, and technique developed through an extended process of working and reworking. The painting was completed on a fine, plain-weave canvas whose dimensions do not correspond to standard-format canvases of the period. This custom format may relate to Bonnard’s practice of working on cut lengths of primed canvas, which he affixed to the walls of his studio with tacks before then stretching them onto stretchers (Fig. 6). “[H]e tacked unstretched canvases directly to the warm white walls of his modest studio, where at any given moment a haphazard combination of interiors, landscapes, or still lifes was in process. Today the studio walls at Le Bosquet still bears the imprints of hundreds of tiny holes.”¹ The White Cupboard may have been tacked to Bonnard’s wall, as multiple small holes are present along the excess turnover fabric and tacking margins. This technique would also account for the painting’s non-standard dimensions² and the crimp marks along all four tacking margins from the canvas pliers as the canvas was stretched (Fig. 7).³

The canvas was commercially prepared with a white or slightly off-white ground layer that appears thin and even. Much of this layer remains visible throughout the composition and is particularly important in the development of the tablecloth in the foreground and open cabinet door. Within this latter feature, Bonnard utilized the exposed ground as negative space to define the wooden components, while a few brushstrokes were used to establish the windowpanes and shapes visible through the glass. This extensive use of exposed ground becomes prominent when viewing the painting in transmitted light, where the light easily passes through the unpainted portions of the canvas (Fig. 8).

No overall underdrawing was identified through microscopy or infrared reflectography (IRR). However, a thin, fluid medium appears to have been used to loosely establish the main body of the cupboard, visible beneath and around the red spaces and shelving. No comparable lines were found beneath the figure, the open cabinet door, or the table in the foreground. Similarly, within the overhead lights, a more opaque fluid line is visible beneath and within the overhead light fixture (Fig. 9). Despite the absence of a complete underdrawing, Bonnard left reserves for the figure and most of the objects within the cupboard, allowing glimpses of the ground layer to remain exposed in these areas. The one clear exception to this is the basket on the middle shelf on the left side of the cupboard, where underlying red paint is continuous across the shelf and visible in skips of paint in the final composition (Fig. 10).

The painting was predominantly created with thin washes, with colors occasionally blending into one another through wet-into-wet application. A few areas, however, were built up with impasto, most notably the skirt of Marthe, Bonnard’s wife, and to a lesser degree the basket on the table and the vertical stile of the cabinet (Fig. 11). In the skirt, Bonnard appears to have first laid in thin layers of paint in varying shades of yellow and green, which were allowed to dry before the more heavily applied pink and white brushstrokes were added. This separation between layers indicates a wet-over-dry paint application. Conversely, wet-into-wet blending is visible in these more heavily applied paints, where pink and white were dabbed and swirled together (Fig. 12).

Although the painting does not contain compositional alterations that would neatly fall within what is commonly understood as an “artist change,” Bonnard frequently revisited and reworked his paintings.⁴ Evidence of this is apparent in the checkered tablecloth, where he scraped down portions of the pattern, leaving the sgraffito marks incorporated into the image. In other sections of the tablecloth, it appears that he rubbed away at the red paint and added white, creating soft pink halos adjacent to the exposed ground layer.⁵ After these adjustments were made and the white paint had dried, Bonnard returned to paint a row of saturated, fluid red squares, with their wet-over-dry application evident by their crisp edges. This is in comparison to the dry brushwork of the red squares found in the center rows of the tablecloth (Fig. 13).

As Bonnard worked, he incorporated carbon-based dry media into the composition, but unlike an underdrawing which occurs before the paint is applied, these drawn elements were applied over the oil paint, indicating that enough time had passed for the paint to have cured without being displaced or disrupted by the drawn marks. In most instances, the material could not be identified, but it appears to be compressed charcoal or oiled charcoal, laid in using its blunt edge.⁶ In some areas, he returned to add more paint over the charcoal, as can be seen in the bottom edge of the skirt and within the lower open cabinet door (Fig. 14).⁷ In the basket on the table, both charcoal and graphite were applied over the paint, with the graphite distinguishable by its metallic sheen (Fig. 15).^{8, 9}

The painting is in good condition. The canvas tension is somewhat slack, necessitating the addition of a supportive padded backing to prevent contact with the stretcher bars. Despite the thin and wash-like application of paint, some cracks have formed, though all remain stable. In the more heavily bodied paint of the skirt, small areas of lifting paint were consolidated in 2017.¹⁰ Minor abrasion and losses are present along the edges and corners. The painting is coated with a thin layer of synthetic varnish, which masks gloss variations between the paint layer and exposed ground. As artists who identified as part of the Nabis group, such as Bonnard, often preferred matte surfaces, it is unlikely that the painting was varnished by the artist at the time of its completion.¹¹ Little retouching is present, with only a few small applications along the edges identified with ultraviolet radiation.¹²

Notes

1. Dita Amory, “The Presence of Objects: Still Life in Bonnard’s Late Paintings,” in Pierre Bonnard: The Late Still Lifes and Interiors, ed. Dita Amory (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 4.

2. The stretcher is believed to be original to the painting.

3. The smaller holes where the red paint meets the white ground relate to non-original staples used to attach polyethylene edging material to the tacking margin.

4. Anthea Callen quotes a contemporary of Bonnard as stating, “His canvases, fixed to the wall with thumbtacks, he sometimes left for months without finishing, then one day added to them a little color smeared with his finger. On more than one occasion, visiting friends, he touched up a canvas sold to them perhaps ten years earlier.” Anthea Callen, Techniques of the Great Masters of Art (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1985), 384. See also, Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold, “‘Promenade en mer’—Image and Portrait,” in Bonnard: The Late Paintings, exh. cat., ed. Sasha M. Newman (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 81–82.

5. “He would take out paint by wiping and rubbing as well as with a knife, as this could give him a more suggestive, clouded surface to paint into.” Bernard Dunstan, Painting Methods of the Impressionists (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1983), 144–45.

6. As a proficient graphic artist, Bonnard’s materials included a wide range of carbon-based materials, including compressed charcoal, oiled charcoal, lithography ink, and graphite.

7. The inside of this cabinet door was originally painted a pale gray before Bonnard added the charcoal and then the yellow paint.

8. Rachel Freeman, conservator of paper and Asian art, communication and examination with the author, July 27, 2026.

9. Bonnard began incorporating drawing media, specifically graphite, in and over his paintings early in his career, and was best known for his graphic work as he began his career. Sarah Lees, “Pierre Bonnard: 28. Woman with a Dog,” in Nineteenth-Century Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, ed. Sarah Lees (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 1:66.

10. Mary Schafer, December 19, 2017, treatment report, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.1.

11. Anthea Callen, “The Unvarnished Truth: Mattness, ‘Primitivism,’ and Modernity in French Painting, c. 1870–1907,” Burlington 136, no. 1100 (November 1994): 738n3. See also: Mariateresa Pullano et al., “Pierre Bonnard’s Oil on Cardboard: A Comparative Study of Two Paintings at the Gothenburg Museum of Art,” Journal of Paper Conservation 24, no. 2 (2023): 46, https://doi.org/10.1080/18680860.2023.2228387.

12. Forrest R. Bailey, June 10, 1979, treatment report, NAMA conservation file, 2015.13.1.

Top of section