Pierre Bonnard

For nearly fifty years Pierre Bonnard painted the same woman, and often painted her in the bath. Her name was Marthe. She was in fragile health and washed compulsively, spending hours in the tub, and Bonnard turned those hours into hundreds of pictures in which the water, the tiles and her body dissolve into a warm haze of colour.

He had come up in the 1890s with the Nabis, a young Paris group who took their name from a Hebrew word for prophets and looked to Gauguin and Japanese prints rather than the academies. Bonnard kept their flat patterning but went his own way with colour. He rarely painted what was in front of him. He would look hard at a room or a garden, then work back in the studio from memory, which is why his interiors feel remembered rather than observed.

Marthe was not his only model. In 1918 he met a young woman called Renee Monchaty and for a time thought of leaving Marthe for her. He married Marthe instead, in 1925, and soon afterwards Renee took her own life. Bonnard kept painting Marthe long after her death in 1942, still setting her slight figure into the tub, from memory.