Ambroise Vollard

Painted in 1904 and held at the Musée d'Orsay, this is the Orsay version of Bonnard's portrait of Ambroise Vollard — the most prominent of three painted in the same year. Vollard had been Bonnard's dealer and had published the artist's early lithographic work; the portrait represents a relationship of mutual professional significance. Among the multiple twentieth-century portraits of Vollard — Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, and Bonnard all painted him — Bonnard's version is characteristically intimate rather than heroic or analytical. The Orsay's version is the most important institutionally, placing the work within the canon of French Post-Impressionist portraiture.

Vollard is presented with a characteristic combination of directness and informality. The background is tonally subdued. Bonnard's mature touch — warm, varied, with subtle colour relationships — is more restrained here than in domestic works, the portrait genre requiring focused characterisation.