Naked in the bathtub

Naked in the Bathtub from 1931, now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, is among the most arresting of Bonnard's bathtub images — a series that became increasingly strange and concentrated as Marthe de Méligny's life grew more reclusive and her obsessive bathing more intense. Bonnard had begun painting the bathtub series as early as the 1910s; by 1931 he had been working the subject for nearly two decades and had developed a compositional approach of extraordinary psychological weight. The bathtub in these mature works has an almost architectural presence — the white enamel rectangle, seen from above or from the side, becomes a structural element as dominant as the figure within it. Bonnard's contemporaries found the bathtub series disturbing, particularly Picasso, who saw in them a kind of obsessive documentation that went beyond portraiture into something more private and perhaps more troubling. The Mnam's extensive collection of his mature work allows this significant canvas to be read within the full development of the bathroom series.

The compressed perspective of the bathroom is taken to an extreme here, with the bathtub filling most of the compositional space. The blue of the water and the warm flesh tones of the submerged figure create the characteristic Bonnard vibration between warm and cool.