The Children's Meal

Painted in 1895 and held at the Metropolitan Museum, this children's mealtime scene belongs to Bonnard's extended observation of domestic family life in the 1890s, much of it centred on his sister Andrée Terrasse's household. Children eating — absorbed, self-directed, indifferent to adult observation — offered a subject that combined the intimist domestic record with the graphic liveliness that Bonnard brought to his printmaking and poster work of the same period. By 1895 Bonnard had begun to move away from the strictest Nabi flatness toward a more casual, Impressionist-inflected handling of family scenes.

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.