Nu accroupi au tub

Nu accroupi au tub (Crouching Nude at the Tub) belongs to the same extended bathroom series as Nu dans le bain, but catches the figure in the act of entering or leaving the tub rather than reclining within it. The crouching posture—one of Degas's preferred positions for his bathing women—suited Bonnard's interest in the contorted, intimate body that lacks self-consciousness before an observer. His bathroom scenes are predicated on the fiction of the unobserved figure, though the presence of the painter's eye is acknowledged by Bonnard's increasingly frank discussion in later interviews of how he posed Marthe. The tub's rim creates a strong horizontal element that the crouching body interrupts with diagonals.

The foreshortened crouching figure is one of the more demanding compositional challenges in this series, and Bonnard handles it through color differentiation rather than precise anatomical drawing. The turquoise water in the tub functions as a complementary ground against the warm flesh tones. The bathroom tiles or floor create geometric patterns around the organic form of the body.