Bonnard was a Post-Impressionist French painter, printmaker, and one of the founding members of the Nabis, best known for his richly coloured, intimate interiors, and his radical treatment of colour as an expressive rather than a descriptive tool. Alongside Denis, Sérusier, and Vuillard, he drew inspiration from Japanese woodblock print, developed a style that emphasised flatness of the canvas through patttern-saturated compositions rather than conventional perspective.
Described as an 'Intimist', his mature paintings return obsessively to the same subjects: the dining room, the garden at Le Cannet, and above all his wife Marthe, whom he continuously painted for four decades. His interiors are rarely as straightforward as they appear, a quality of stillness and psycholigical enclosure runs beneath the surface, giving his work a quitely unsettling depth. By the end of his career, his colour had become entirely autonomous, detatched from descriptive accuracy and closer in spirit to the colour field painters who would follow a generation later. His insistence on colour as an emotional rather than a descriptive force placed him quietly ahead of his time, anticipating future movements like Abstract Expressionism.
