Selfportrait by Pierre Bonnard

Bonnard made numerous self-portraits across his career, but he was far less celebrated for them than for his interiors, nudes, and landscapes—which may partly explain their particular psychological candor. He depicted himself aging, often looking into a bathroom mirror, his face rendered with the same dispassionate color analysis he applied to fruit or tiles. These self-portraits from his late period, some made at Le Cannet during the German Occupation, have been read as records of an old man's confrontation with mortality, isolated in his villa while the world convulsed around him. Bonnard did not leave the house much during the Occupation years, and his self-portrait practice intensified during this period.

The mirror-based self-portrait typically shows the face slightly flattened and somewhat frontal, with the bathroom or studio setting visible around it. Bonnard applies paint to his own face with the same analytical detachment he brings to other subjects—no idealization, no flattery, but careful observation of how light falls on aged skin. The palette for the face tends toward warm ochres and pinks with cool violet shadows.