Reine Natanson et Marthe Bonnard au corsage rouge

This 1928 double portrait, held at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, brings together two women from distinctly different parts of Bonnard's life: Reine Natanson, wife of Alexandre Natanson who had co-founded the Revue Blanche — the journal that had been the Nabis' cultural home in the 1890s — and Marthe Bonnard, his companion since 1893 and his legal wife from 1925. The two women occupied opposite poles of his existence: Reine represented the sophisticated social and intellectual world of the Revue Blanche circle, which had connected Bonnard to Toulouse-Lautrec, Mallarmé, and the progressive cultural life of fin-de-siècle Paris; Marthe, by contrast, was reclusive, intensely private, and was systematically withdrawing from the world during the late 1920s as her health and anxiety worsened. Their appearance together in a single canvas is exceptional and must be read as a deliberate act of integration — Bonnard bringing the two worlds of his life into the same chromatic field.

Two figures in a domestic interior setting are painted with Bonnard's characteristic luminous color — the red corsage of one woman creating a vivid focal point. His broken, mosaic-like application of varied color strokes gives the scene its distinctive shimmering quality. Light from an unseen source fills the interior with warm color.