Pierre Bonnard 'After the Shower' Exhibition Poster – Post-Impressionist Art Print, 1914

After the Shower (1914) belongs to Pierre Bonnard's long sequence of intimate domestic scenes — the genre he made his own and for which the term “Intimism” was coined to describe him and Édouard Vuillard. The subject is the figure of his lifelong companion Marthe, half-dressed in a sunlit interior, captured in the loose, flickering brushwork and resonant colour that characterise his pre-war work.

Bonnard was a founding member of Les Nabis in the early 1890s, the Paris-based group that took its name from the Hebrew word for “prophets” and sought to extend the colour and decorative principles of Gauguin into modern interior subjects. By 1914 he had moved beyond the Nabis aesthetic into the territory that would occupy him for the rest of his life: the play of light across patterned domestic surfaces, the figure dissolving into colour. He worked not from the model directly but from memory, sketches, and photographs — “the presence of the object,” he once said, “is a hindrance to the painter.”

The model was Marthe de Méligny, born Maria Boursin, whom Bonnard had met in Paris in 1893 and would marry in 1925. She appears in more than 300 of his paintings across five decades, almost always engaged in private domestic acts — bathing, dressing, eating — and almost always seen as if remembered rather than observed. Recent scholarship has revised earlier accounts of her life, but her presence in the work remains the steady centre of Bonnard's mature practice.

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