Nude with Covered Legs

Nude with Covered Legs from 1911, held at the Villa Flora in Winterthur, belongs to a group of works Bonnard made during the prewar period when his domestic settings were becoming more psychologically charged and his color increasingly personal. Villa Flora was the home of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser, passionate Swiss collectors who assembled one of Europe's finest concentrations of Post-Impressionist painting — exceptional groups of Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse. The specific motif of covered legs — the figure partly draped, partly exposed — introduces a tension between concealment and revelation distinct from his fully nude studies.

The partially covered figure creates a compositional division between the warm tones of exposed skin and the varied colors of fabric, allowing Bonnard to play two different surface textures against each other. The handling of the cloth is nearly as attentive as that of the flesh.