In the Bathroom

In the Bathroom, painted in 1907 and held at Tate Britain, is among Bonnard's earliest explorations of the bathroom as a pictorial subject — a setting he would return to hundreds of times over five decades, producing one of the most sustained engagements with a single domestic space in the history of painting. Marthe de Méligny's well-documented obsessive bathing provided both the psychological atmosphere and the repeated subject matter; her hours in the tub, while rooted in severe anxiety by all accounts, created for Bonnard a subject of extraordinary pictorial richness. Water, reflected light, tile patterns, the body's partial immersion or emergence — these elements gave him a continuously varied yet intimately familiar scene. Tate's acquisition of this early example makes it possible to trace the development of this subject from its relatively restrained 1907 beginnings, when Bonnard was still working out the formal problems of the bathroom space, to the more radically chromatic and psychologically complex versions of the 1920s and 1930s that are generally considered his masterpieces.

The bathroom setting allows Bonnard to work with the particular quality of diffused interior light filtered through water and steam. The palette here is warmer and more muted than his later bathroom works, with a greater degree of tonal modeling.