The Lesson

Painted in 1926 and held at the Phillips Collection, this domestic scene depicting a lesson — possibly a tutoring or music lesson in a bourgeois home — belongs to Bonnard's sustained observation of domestic life in all its quotidian particularity. The Phillips Collection's holding of Bonnard is exceptional for an American institution; Duncan Phillips was one of the most perceptive collectors of his work outside France. A lesson scene in a domestic setting bridges the intimate and the social: two figures in a shared domestic space, one instructing the other, the scene rendered with Bonnard's characteristic absorption of human activity into a richly coloured environment.

Two figures in close proximity create the social centre of the composition, surrounded by the warm chromatic field of a domestic interior. The brushwork is mature and confident, the room's colour environment rendered with the same attention as the figures.