Pierre Bonnard
Nabi, then the painter of domestic light, and of his wife in the bath for thirty years.
Pierre Bonnard was born near Paris in 1867, trained for the law, and joined the Nabis in 1888 with Vuillard and Denis, making flat decorative panels and some of the finest colour lithography of the 1890s. From about 1900 he moved towards the subject that occupied the rest of his life: interiors, tables laid for lunch, gardens seen through windows, and Marthe, his companion of nearly fifty years, in the bath. He painted from memory and small notebook sketches rather than from the motif, and worked on unstretched canvas pinned to the wall, cutting the picture to size only when it was finished. He died at Le Cannet in 1947.
Because he painted on unstretched canvas and trimmed afterwards, edges are often irregular and a later stretcher or a lined canvas is common — that is a normal part of the history rather than a defect, but it needs to be understood. The estate settlement was long and contested and provenance for works dispersed in the 1950s can be complicated. Bonnard's prints, particularly the Vollard-published lithographs and the Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris album, are catalogued by Bouvet and are a substantial market in themselves.
If you own a work by Pierre Bonnard
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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