Portrait du docteur Maurice Girardin

Portrait du docteur Maurice Girardin, at the Petit Palais in Paris, is Bonnard's 1917 portrait of the collector Maurice Girardin, who was among the most important French collectors of Post-Impressionist work in the early twentieth century. Girardin assembled an exceptional collection of Bonnard, Vuillard, and their contemporaries, eventually bequeathing much of it to the Petit Palais. The portrait reflects both the friendship between artist and patron and Bonnard's approach to male portraiture: informal, non-heroic, attentive to the sitter's particular physical presence within a specific environment.

Bonnard situates Girardin within a rich chromatic environment rather than against a neutral ground, the portrait becoming as much a study of an inhabited space as of an individual face. The figure is rendered with Bonnard's characteristic all-over chromatic vibrancy, warm and cool passages building the form without conventional academic shadow.