Nude, Red Chair

Nude, Red Chair from 1905 is an early work in which the bold colour of the furniture plays a significant compositional and chromatic role against the nude figure — a strategy that anticipates the more developed colour interactions of his mature work. The red chair as a pictorial device in domestic nude painting would be explored by many artists in the early twentieth century, most notably Matisse; Bonnard's 1905 version precedes by several years the systematic exploitation of this colour relationship in Matisse's Nice interiors, suggesting that both painters were independently developing similar formal strategies from the shared premises of Post-Impressionist colour theory. In 1905 Bonnard was in his early thirties, recently returned from concentrated work in the decorative arts and printmaking, and his paintings were beginning to develop the domestic chromatic intensity of his mature style. The boldly coloured furniture against the nude body would remain a recurrent compositional device throughout his career, the red, pink, or orange of domestic objects providing the chromatic foil against which the flesh tones of the figure could be measured.

The red of the chair is the dominant chromatic event in the composition, pulling the eye and establishing a warm temperature against which the pale flesh tones read differently than they would against a neutral or cool ground. The color relationships here are more architectonic than in later Bonnard.