Pierre Bonnard

K. X. Roussel, France (possibly)
Private Collection, France 
Huguette Berès, Paris
Acquired from the above on October 2, 1993.

London, Marlborough Fine Arts Ltd, Roussel, Bonnard, Vuillard, 1954
London, Tate Gallery & New York, Museum of Modern Art, Bonnard, 1998, no. 21, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Antoine Terrasse, Bonnard, Paris, 1988, illustrated p. 75
Jean & Henry Dauberville, Pierre Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, 1888-1905, vol. I, Paris, 1992, no. 225, illustrated p. 234 

The board is stable. The corners of the board are reinforced with small pieces of board, which are affixed to the back. Under UV light one hairline stroke of vertical inpainting fluoresces in the upper left quadrant, a pindot is visible at center of top edge and a few other tiny pindots at extreme upper right corner, otherwise a few other pigments fluoresce but appear to be original. This work is in very good condition.
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Marthe Bonnard sur un divan is a remarkably intimate painting of Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard’s muse and model from the mid-1890s until the end of her life. Bonnard first met Marthe in 1893 when she was working as a shop girl in Paris, and she soon became his life-long companion, although they did not marry until 1925 after the death of Bonnard’s young mistress Renée Monchaty. According to Charles Terrasse, the artist’s nephew, “It is [Marthe] who appears in his pictures, early and later, more than anyone else: a woman of beautiful bodily proportions and peculiar gesture, fleeting and free, of which the great observer’s eye would always catch a gesture, a movement, or an undulation in the light” (Charles Terrasse, Bonnard and his Environment (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964, p. 16).

Marthe appears repeatedly throughout Bonnard’s oeuvre and is almost always presented within, and as an integral component of, her domestic setting. Marthe’s dark shirt and shoes in this painting echo the divan and wallpaper. At once remote and intimate, Marthe Bonnard sur un divan exemplifies a central Nabis theme: that of the woman depicted in a domestic, interior setting, with the viewer occupying the role of voyeur, a role we are reminded of by Marthe’s vulnerable supine position. We find Marthe lost in a private moment, resting quietly and unaware of being watched. The voyeurism of the present work anticipates the artist’s later exploration of the nude in the bathroom, an interest in the unself-conscious woman in her own domestic space that he shared with Degas and Renoir.

Bonnard afforded this seemingly unremarkable activity his utmost attention, clearly besotted with this woman and interested in her every move. Sarah Whitfield remarks on the intensely personal nature of his paintings: “Yet, from the start, this modest and most discreet of men, this least public of artists made his daily life the subject of his art, observing steadily and calmly everything that was closest to him: his family, his surroundings, his companion, his animals… The moments he chooses to paint are the soothing lulls that punctuate a domestic routine” (quoted in Bonnard (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York & Tate Gallery, London, 1998, pp. 9-10).