Nude

Nude from 1903, held at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, is an early example of Bonnard's engagement with the female nude as he was moving away from his Nabi origins toward a more sustained painterly investigation of domestic space. At this stage Bonnard had not yet developed the extreme chromatic intensity of his later work, but the interest in the figure integrated into interior light — rather than posed against a neutral ground — is already apparent. It is a pivotal work in the development of what would become one of art history's most distinctive bodies of nude painting.

The palette is somewhat cooler and more restrained than the mature Bonnard, with tonal modeling more evident than in his later work. The integration of figure into interior light is present but not yet taken to the extreme flattening of his 1920s and 1930s canvases.