Pierre Bonnard

Estate of the artist
Jacques Dubourg, Paris
Heinz Berggruen, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owners in the early 1970s

This intimate depiction of a young woman is one of several bust-portraits of female figures that Bonnard completed in the late 1910s and 1920s.  These works were precursors to the full-length figures that would occupy him in later years, when depictions of solitary women, often portrayed in the bathtub, would become a staple of his oeuvre.  Although the sitter for this picture is anonymous, it is most likely the artist’s wife Marthe, whose image was recurrent in many of the works of this era.

The quiet beauty of Jeune femme à la gorge découverte exemplifies Bonnard's own introspective character and the intensely private nature of his art.  As Nicholas Watkins writes of this period, "In gradually withdrawing from life Bonnard developed a strand in his art which had run parallel with the landscapes and decorations in the pastoral tradition.  He abandoned any claim to the high status of history painting.  Instead of dealing with the public world, he looked inwards.  The rooms within which he lived contained his subject-matter, and an infinitely complex dialogue ensued between art and life. His art spanned the genres. . . .  Bonnard was a painter of sentiment as well as place.  Each painting begun in the memory of a specific visual experience was transmuted through nostalgia into an earthly paradise" (Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 167).