The Artist's Sister and Her Children

Painted in 1898 and held at the National Gallery of Art, this group portrait of Bonnard's sister Andrée with her children captures an intimate family moment in his characteristic early manner. Andrée Bonnard married the composer Claude Terrasse in 1890; their children — several of them — appear in various Bonnard family scenes from the late 1890s. By 1898 the Nabi group's formal experiments had produced a distinctive style in which family subjects were treated with affectionate observation rather than sentimentality, the figures caught in unselfconscious moments of domestic life. Bonnard's warmth toward his sister's family is evident across several works from this period.

The group is arranged with casual informality, children and adult occupying the frame without formal hierarchy. The palette is warm and domestic — ochres, greens, cream whites. The brushwork is more fluid than the early Nabi works, moving toward the open touch of his middle period.