Le Chat blanc

In the early 1890s the other members of the Nabis, a circle of young Paris painters, called Bonnard "the very Japanese Nabi", and this small picture on cardboard from 1894 shows what they meant. The bold, off-centre composition and the cat laid flat against a plain background come from the Japanese prints he admired, where cats were a favourite subject.

The Musée d'Orsay reads the distortion as a deliberate joke. The back is arched as far as it will go, the head sinks into the shoulders, the eyes are narrowed to slits and the legs are stretched out of all proportion. Those legs cost Bonnard the most effort. His preparatory drawings try out different positions, and an X-ray of the painting shows many changes, some of which can be made out with the naked eye.