Nude against the light

Bonnard made this around 1908, in the years when a private bathroom with running water was becoming an ordinary comfort in a middle-class Paris home. The woman is Marthe, his lifelong companion and constant model, standing in a small tub and dabbing on eau de cologne after her bath. Behind her a window pours warm, almost shadowless light into the room, so she reads as a dark silhouette wrapped in colour rather than a solidly modelled figure. A mirror on the wall shows her again from another angle, a habit of Bonnard's. The bright flecks scattered across the floor and the furniture are his way of letting the daylight break up every surface it touches.