Woman with cat

Painted in 1912 and held at the Musée d'Orsay, this pairing of a woman and a cat brings together two of Bonnard's most persistent pictorial concerns within the charged domestic atmosphere of his Vernonnet years. Marthe de Méligny is the almost certain subject — she appears in hundreds of Bonnard's paintings, usually absorbed in domestic activity or private bodily ritual, rarely engaged with the outside world. Cats appear throughout his work as components of the lived interior, their independent self-absorption and physical grace offering a visual counterpoint to the human figure's more complex psychological presence. By 1912 Bonnard's colour had become considerably more intense than his early Nabi work — the flat, Japonisme-influenced chromatic zones of the 1890s had given way to a more freely worked surface where colour was determined by emotional response rather than observation. His friend Vuillard's colour remained more muted and his domestic subjects more claustrophobic; Bonnard's slightly sunnier domesticity, even in enclosed interior scenes, reflects the temperature of his more openly sensory relationship to the visible world.

Warm flesh tones of the woman contrast with the cat's varied fur pattern. The domestic interior environment provides a background of contrasting colour zones. The handling is fluid and sensory, conveying the tactile relationships between figure and animal.