Woman Putting on Her Stockings

Woman Putting on Her Stockings is among the most directly connected of Bonnard's works to Degas's series of women in various stages of dressing and undressing—a subject Degas had made his own through the pastel series of the 1880s and 1890s. Bonnard admired Degas and the older artist's frank domestication of the partially dressed female body was clearly generative for his own intimate figure subjects. The stocking-donning gesture—one leg raised, body bent—is a specific pose that Degas had used, and Bonnard's version acknowledges this inheritance while transforming it through his characteristic color handling and domestic setting. The work probably dates from his middle period when he was consciously working through the influence of his Impressionist predecessors.

The pose creates strong diagonal lines across the composition—the raised leg, the bent spine—that Bonnard balances with the horizontal and vertical elements of the bedroom setting. The black or dark stocking against pale skin creates the same tonal contrast he used in Woman in Black Stockings. The surrounding bedroom interior is rendered with the dense, all-over visual texture typical of his domestic interiors.