Nude before a Mirror

Nude before a Mirror from 1915, held at the National Gallery of Ireland, depicts a figure in the act of self-regard — a subject that introduces a doubled spectatorship into the already complex relationship between painter and subject. Bonnard painted mirrors frequently throughout his career because they transformed the nude's relationship to her own image, introduced additional planes of reflected space, and allowed the painter to present the figure from multiple angles simultaneously. The 1915 date places this work in the middle of the First World War — a context that Bonnard's domestic scenes seem almost deliberately to exclude, maintaining their interior warmth against historical catastrophe with a consistency that has been read as both escapism and moral affirmation. The National Gallery of Ireland's holding places this work within the context of a collection that has been particularly active in assembling French Post-Impressionist holdings, and the mirror work's psychological complexity makes it one of the more searching of Bonnard's intimate figure subjects from this period.

The mirror introduces a compositional device that allows Bonnard to show two surfaces simultaneously — the figure and her reflection — both painted with equal immediacy. The spatial ambiguity this creates is deliberate, folding the interior into itself.