Nude in Bathtub

Painted in 1941 and held at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, this bathtub nude is a late culmination of Bonnard's most sustained pictorial project: Marthe in the bath. Marthe de Méligny, who suffered from a serious skin condition, bathed for hours each day, and Bonnard turned this private ritual into one of modern painting's most sustained explorations of the intimate nude figure. By 1941 — Marthe would die the following year — the bathtub series had developed into works of extraordinary chromatic intensity, the body submerged in brilliantly coloured water that reads as pure colour rather than a naturalistic liquid. The Carnegie work belongs to the peak of this late series.

The bathwater is rendered in brilliant blues, greens, and turquoises that create a chromatically intense field surrounding the pale nude body. The tiled walls and bathroom fittings are rendered in contrasting warm tones. The figure is dissolved into the colour environment with deliberate ambiguity.