Interior: The Terrasse Children

Interior: The Terrasse Children depicts the children of Bonnard's brother-in-law Claude Terrasse, who married his sister Andrée. Bonnard was closely involved with the Terrasse family throughout his career—Claude was a musician and composer with whom Bonnard collaborated on illustrated publications—and their children were among the few children he depicted with any regularity. The Terrasse domestic interior at Grand-Lemps provided subjects he returned to repeatedly in the 1890s and 1900s, and the children's natural, unselfconscious presence in the family home gave him figure material quite different from the posed or semi-posed domestic scenes involving Marthe.

Children in an interior setting give Bonnard compositional elements of varied scale—smaller figures whose proportions differ from adults—that he integrates into the overall domestic setting through shared color temperature. The handling of children's clothing and posture tends toward the casual and slightly loosened compared to his more careful rendering of adult subjects. The domestic environment—furniture, wallpaper, floor—envelops the small figures with Bonnard's characteristic decorative density.