Naked in the bathtub

Naked in the Bathtub from 1931, now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, is among the most arresting of Bonnard's bathtub images — a series that became increasingly strange and intense as Marthe de Méligny's life grew more reclusive. The bathtub itself becomes an almost sarcophagal form in these works, the figure submerged within it as if in suspension between states. Bonnard began the bathtub series as early as the 1910s and continued it almost until his death in 1947, accumulating a body of work unparalleled in its sustained attention to a single domestic object.

The compressed perspective of the bathroom is taken to an extreme here, with the bathtub filling most of the compositional space. The blue of the water and the warm flesh tones of the submerged figure create the characteristic Bonnard vibration between warm and cool.