Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color.
42 Facts About Pierre Bonnard
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Pierre Bonnard painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.
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Pierre Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine on 3 October 1867.
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Pierre Bonnard's father, Eugene Bonnard, was from the Dauphine, and was a senior official in the French Ministry of War.
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Pierre Bonnard had a brother, Charles, and a sister, Andree, who in 1890 married the composer Claude Terrasse.
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Pierre Bonnard received his education in the Lycee Louis-le-Grand and Lycee Charlemagne in Vanves.
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Pierre Bonnard showed a talent for drawing and water colors, as well as caricatures.
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Pierre Bonnard painted frequently in the gardens of his parents' country home at Le Grand-Lemps near La Cote-Saint-Andre in the Dauphine.
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Pierre Bonnard received his baccalaureate in the classics, and, to satisfy his father, between 1886 and 1887 earned his license in law, and began practicing as a lawyer in 1888.
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In 1888, Pierre Bonnard was accepted by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Edouard Vuillard and Ker Xavier Roussel.
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Pierre Bonnard sold his first commercial work of art, a design for poster for France-Champagne, which helped him convince his family that he could make a living as an artist.
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From 1893 until her death, Pierre Bonnard lived with Marthe de Meligny, and she was the model for many of his paintings, including many nudes.
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Pierre Bonnard received pressure from a different direction to continue painting.
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Some Nabis had highly religious, philosophical or mystical approaches to their paintings, but Pierre Bonnard remained more cheerful and unaffiliated.
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Pierre Bonnard devoted an increasing amount of attention to decorative art, designing furniture, fabrics, fans and other objects.
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Pierre Bonnard continued to design posters for France-Champagne, which gained him an audience outside the art world.
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Pierre Bonnard made a series of illustrations for the music books of his brother-in-law, Claude Terrasse.
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Pierre Bonnard made his first portrait of his future wife, Marthe, whom he married in 1925.
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Pierre Bonnard illustrated a novel, Marie, by Peter Nansen, published in series by in La Revue Blanche.
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Pierre Bonnard took part in an exhibition with the other Nabis at the Bernheim Jeaune gallery.
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Pierre Bonnard presented nine paintings at the Salon des Independents in 1901.
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Pierre Bonnard showed works at the Autumn Salon in 1923, and in 1924 was honored with a retrospective of sixty-eight of his works at the Galerie Druet.
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The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 forced Pierre Bonnard to depart Paris for the south of France, where he remained until the end of the war.
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Pierre Bonnard was first able to see the works of Japanese artists via the Paris gallery of Siegfried Bing.
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Originally designed to appear together as a single screen, Pierre Bonnard decided to display Women in the garden as four separate decorative panels.
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Pierre Bonnard often pictured women in checkered blouses, a design he said he had discovered in Chinese prints.
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Pierre Bonnard wrote, "Notre generation a toujours cherche les rapports de l'art avec la vie".
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At the beginning of his career, Pierre Bonnard designed posters for a French champagne firm, for which he gained public attention.
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Pierre Bonnard later produced many sets of engravings illustrating the works of the avant-garde authors of his time.
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Poster for France-Champagne by Pierre Bonnard, which made him known outside the art world.
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Pierre Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brush marks and close values.
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Pierre Bonnard's fondness for depicting intimate scenes of everyday life, has led to him being called an "Intimist"; his wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades.
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Pierre Bonnard is seen seated at the kitchen table, with the remnants of a meal; or nude, as in a series of paintings where she reclines in the bathtub.
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Pierre Bonnard painted several self-portraits, landscapes, street scenes, and many still lifes, which usually depicted flowers and fruit.
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Pierre Bonnard then painted the canvas in his studio from his notes.
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Pierre Bonnard worked on numerous canvases simultaneously, which he tacked onto the walls of his small studio.
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Pierre Bonnard was described, by his own friend and historians, as a man of "quiet temperament" and one who was unobtrusively independent.
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Pierre Bonnard has been described as "the most thoroughly idiosyncratic of all the great twentieth-century painters", and the unusual vantage points of his compositions rely less on traditional modes of pictorial structure than voluptuous color, poetic allusions and visual wit.
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Two major exhibitions of Pierre Bonnard's work took place in 1998: February through May at the Tate Gallery in London, and from June through October at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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Pierre Bonnard's wit has everything to do with the eccentric nature of his compositions.
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Pierre Bonnard finds it funny to sneak a figure into a corner, or have a cat staring out at the viewer.
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In 2016, the Legion of Honor in San Francisco hosted an exhibit "Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia", featuring more than 70 works spanning the artist's entire career.