The Children's Meal

Painted in 1895 and held at the Metropolitan Museum, this children's mealtime scene belongs to Bonnard's sustained observation of his sister Andrée Terrasse's family life — a domestic world of children, meals, and garden that provided him with some of his most productive subject matter during the mid-1890s. The Terrasse household near Fontainebleau offered both the specific intimacy of a closely observed family and a range of subjects — children eating, sleeping, playing — that allowed Bonnard to develop the informal, casually observed domestic genre that would distinguish his intimist approach from Vuillard's more claustrophobically interior scenes. By 1895 Bonnard was simultaneously active as a printmaker, poster designer, and theatre decorator alongside his painting; the graphic liveliness of his poster work — the flat colour and bold outline of the 1891 France-Champagne poster — fed back into his paintings' handling of pattern and incident. Children eating are absorbed, self-directed, indifferent to adult observation: exactly the quality of unself-conscious presence that Bonnard sought in all his intimate domestic subjects.

The children's absorption in eating creates informal, unposed compositions. The table surface — cloth, crockery, food — provides a foreground plane of warm domestic colour. The handling is looser than the early Nabi works, with a casual, observational directness.