Nude before a Mirror

Nude before a Mirror from 1915, held at the National Gallery of Ireland, depicts a figure in the act of self-regard — a subject that layers self-observation over the artist's observation, creating a doubled spectatorship. Bonnard painted mirrors frequently because they introduced additional planes of reflected space and transformed the nude's relationship to her own image. The 1915 date places this in the middle of the First World War, a context Bonnard's domestic scenes seem almost deliberately to exclude; his art consistently maintained an interior warmth against historical catastrophe.

The mirror introduces a compositional device that allows Bonnard to show two surfaces simultaneously — the figure and her reflection — both painted with equal immediacy. The spatial ambiguity this creates is deliberate, folding the interior into itself.