“The human form is by turns idealised, eroticised, provocative, forbidden and fragile.” Marthe, the wife of artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), spent much of her later life in the bath. Suffering from a tubercular condition, she was prescribed water therapy, and so bathed for several hours each day.
Bonnard painted her more than 300 times, many of his works showing her preparing for, immersed in, or emerging from a tomb-like bathtub. His gentle, sensuous depictions range from the traditional viewing perspective of the bather seen from behind, to radical compositions in which Marthe becomes a fragmented figure whose legs float in disembodied space, the blue tones of her flesh visible through the water.
Of more than 100 works in The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate, it is Bonnard’s paintings of…
