Pierre Bonnard

This summer I visited my brother in Little Rock and he took me to a museum that had a decent collection of impressionist paintings. I was particularly pleased to see a Pierre Bonnard because I had just read The Sea, by John Banville, and the protagonist is doing a study of Bonnard, who is probably the king of painting your wife in the bathtub, or about to get in the bathtub, or having just got out of the bathtub. The interesting thing is that Bonnard paints his wife as a young girl even though when she posed for him she was like seventy. Anyhow, I was just reading this interview with the painter Peter Doig, and the topic of Bonnard came up; I thought this comment was interesting:

"He somehow manages to create a space between what he is looking at and thinking about, because a lot of his work - especially when he is painting his wife - is thinking back. Somehow he is painting the space that is behind the eyes. It's as if you were lying in bed trying hard to remember what something looked like. And Bonnard managed to paint that strange state."