Painted 380 Times, Her Face Almost Never Shown: Bonnard's Bathroom

A woman submerged in a bathtub, her face turned away, her body wrapped in soft, warm color. The painter, Pierre Bonnard, drew heavily from Japanese woodblock prints, and that influence shows throughout his work — bold compositions, flat planes of color, and framing that feels almost daringly cropped.

The woman is Marthe, Bonnard's lifelong companion and model. The story goes that when they first met, she lied to him about both her age and her name. Despite that, Bonnard stayed by her side for the rest of his life and painted her more than 380 times. Strangely, though, across all those paintings, there are almost none where her face is clearly visible — she's always looking down, turned at an angle, or submerged in water.

When Bonnard bought a house outside Paris, he even built a bathroom there especially for Marthe — a measure of just how central she was to both his life and his art. But what Bonnard was really capturing wasn't a portrait of Marthe as an individual so much as the atmosphere of a fleeting moment made of water, light, and color — and a quiet, deep affection for someone he'd spent a lifetime with.