Pierre Bonnard 1867 - 1947

Pierre BONNARD (Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867 / Le Cannet 1947) was born into a cultivated and upper-class family where he received a carefully planned education and a taste for painting. With his father's support, he planned to become a high-ranking government official. He successfully completed his secondary and higher education and became an intellectual, a trait evident throughout his career.

Bonnard simultaneously took courses at the Académie Julien from the age of twenty on, meeting his first painter friends Sérusier, Denis, Vuillard and Ranson. Sharing with them a clear desire to detach from the widespread impressionist movement, in 1888 he joined the Nabi group ("prophets" in Hebrew). Under the influence of Gauguin, the Nabis tried to restore a purely decorative dimension to painting, by simplifying colours and denying volume.

More self determining in the face of different influences than his companions, whom he met in Père Tanguy's shop or in the restaurant "L'Os à moëlle", Bonnard nonetheless took from the Nabi period a lesson in graphic sobriety and luminosity.

In the 1890’s Bonnard produced designs for posters, prints and book illustrations, and also for decorative panels, stained glass and furniture. In his work he stressed pattern and design at the expense of definition of form in space.