Nude in an Interior

Painted in 1935 and held at the National Gallery of Art, this is the NGA's version of the indoor nude subject that Bonnard explored in related compositions during the mid-1930s at Le Cannet. The female figure in a domestic interior — bathroom, bedroom, dressing room — was Bonnard's most sustained subject from around 1910 onward. By 1935 his approach to this theme had been refined across hundreds of works; the figure is placed within a chromatic environment of extraordinary intensity, the domestic interior rendered as pure colour experience in which the human form participates as one element among many. The NGA's holding makes this available to the broad American public interested in modern European painting.

The interior space surrounding the nude figure is saturated with colour — warm and cool surfaces creating a chromatic field in which the flesh tones are placed as warm accents. Bonnard's spatial organisation uses colour temperature to define planes without conventional tonal modelling.