\paperw4395 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 French painter.\par
While studying law, Pierre Bonnard also launched himself on a career in art by attending courses at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Paris and the AcadΘmie Julian. Here he met SΘrusier, Denis and Vuillard, with whom he formed the Nabis group in the last decade of the century. Influenced by the work of Gauguin, the Nabis moved away from Impressionism to develop a more co
nsidered style of painting, symbolic in content and characterized by the use of flat and uniform areas of color, yielding results similar to those obtained with enamel. The desire to bring beauty into peopleÆs daily lives led Bonnard and the other Nabis
painters to devote themselves to the applied arts, producing posters, wallpaper and book illustrations. It was during this period that Bonnard painted pictures like \i The Croquet Game\i0 (1892, MusΘe d'Orsay, Paris), \i Les Grands Boulevards\i0 (1900,
London, private collection) and \i The Passerby\i0 (1894, Montreux, private collection). At the beginning of the twentieth century BonnardÆs interest in Impressionist painting was rekindled and he started to produce portraits, pictures of interiors, an
d sunlit landscapes like \i The Bandstand\i0 (1908 Paris, private collection), \i Movement in the Street\i0 (1905, Washington, Phillips Collection) and the \i Portrait of Misia Godebska\i0 (1908, Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection). Indifferent to
the rapid changes taking place in French and European art during the first half of the twentieth century, the painter spent the last part of his life in the South of France, surrounded by his family and the domestic world that he continued to represent i
n his pictures (\i The Table\i0 , 1925, Tate Gallery, London; \i Nude at the Mirror\i0 , 1933, CaÆ Pesaro, Venice).
