Woman with cat

Painted in 1912 and held at the Musée d'Orsay, this work connects two of Bonnard's most persistent subjects — the female figure (almost certainly Marthe) and the domestic animal. Cats appear throughout Bonnard's work as components of the intimate domestic world: like objects on a table or patterns on a tablecloth, they are part of the visual texture of a lived interior. By 1912 Bonnard's colour had become considerably more intense than his early Nabi work, and the domestic subject of a woman with a cat could sustain a richly chromatic composition without any decorative or narrative pretext beyond itself.

Warm flesh tones of the woman contrast with the cat's varied fur pattern. The domestic interior environment provides a background of contrasting colour zones. The handling is fluid and sensory, conveying the tactile relationships between figure and animal.