French painter Pierre Bonnard’s colourful celebrations of the bathing body of his wife and muse Marthe are among his most recognisable images, many of them on display at last year’s popular Tate exhibition. From his early illustrations of the 1890s to the large, sun-filled canvases he made in the 1940s, she is the focus of the scene. Yet art historians have frequently emphasised the artist’s bad luck in landing such a difficult, sickly spouse, even suggesting she spent most of her time supine in a bathtub.
Now documents uncovered by a British academic tell a different story about the life of the auburn-haired Frenchwoman who Bonnard met while she was working in a flower shop in 1893. The new findings, published by The Conversation website, shed a fresh light on their relationship, on the famous paintings, and on the financial motivations behind those who first sought to damage his wife’s reputation.
The research of Bonnard expert Lucy Whelan, of Durham University, has uncovered the contrasting picture of a woman who was already married and who had overcome many social disadvantages. “After contacting a local archivist, Pierre Allart, and working from his tip-offs, I have uncovered documents that suggest an entirely different shape to Marthe’s life,” said Whelan. “They show that Marthe was not the ever-constant model that has always been imagined. Neither was she his effective jailer.”
At the centre of the story is a battle over Bonnard’s hugely valuable legacy of work. Marthe, who was born poor, as Maria Boursin, died in 1942, and her well-heeled husband was later found guilty of forging papers to prevent her family from inheriting half of his paintings under French law. Following his own death five years later, a major legal appeal against this judgment was fought and won on behalf of Bonnard’s family, and this was done chiefly by demolishing his late wife’s good name.
It was argued in court that Marthe was paranoid and antisocial, while Bonnard’s supposedly reclusive period in the south of France in the 1920s was explained by her dislike of company and jealousy of his friends. After establishing the dead woman’s unreliability, the painter’s family argued that Bonnard had never been aware of her wider family’s existence, and so he could not have been guilty of deliberately defrauding them. It was also claimed that Marthe adopted a new surname for herself, De Meligny, to sever all links with her past.
But the new papers prove her previous marriage to an unknown “Monsieur Renard”, and suggest a different reason for their strained relationship, and for the paintings. An early portrait from 1900, Man and Woman, depicts the new couple in a strangely distant pose, divided by a screen, while a 1925 still life called The Window gains new resonance, according to Whelan. It shows a copy of a romantic novel called Marie which Bonnard had illustrated with images of Marthe just two years before she declared herself as married to someone else. Whelan speculates that the earlier marriage explains why the couple were not free to marry until 1925.
Marthe’s detractors have instead insisted she forced the painter to marry her at this late stage in the relationship to prevent him leaving her for a lover, Renée Monchaty.
“She was certainly ill sometimes, and in the last decade of life, in her 60s, it seems she didn’t want to socialise any longer, but there’s no evidence for her portrayal as a madwoman,” said Whelan.
“And the idea that she was always in the bath has no real basis. There are reasons in art history for choosing that setting. A bathroom setting allowed for a nude portrait, and meant Bonnard could play with the light on the water and the decorative tiles. And, anyway, we know he painted from sketches he had made quickly, so there is no need for her to have stayed lying there.”
Bonnard’s family was well off, and he went to one of the best schools in France, so Whelan believes it was the late painter’s family and bourgeois coterie who continued to denigrate his one-time muse’s character.
“This was a lot to do with class. One of the women who testified at the legal appeal in 1953 was Annette Vaillant, a friend of the Bonnards,” said Whelan. “And what she said was revealing of all their attitudes: ‘Marthe’s idea of personal adornment never rose any higher than cheap finery’.”
• This article was amended on 18 May 2020 to clarify remarks by Whelan about Marthe in her 6os: to correct the date of the painting The Window (1925) and the name of the novel depicted in it (Marie) and to change a reference to “prone in a bathtub” when “supine” was meant.
