EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

IN THE BATH, FOREVER: ON MARTHE DE MÉLIGNY

CLAIRE BLANCHE

June 5, 2025

She was not who she said she was, but for fifty years, she was nearly everything he painted. This essay traces the blurred figure of Marthe de Méligny through the luminous, melancholic world of Pierre Bonnard. It is a meditation on memory, love, and the quiet radicalism of painting someone again and again until they become both unreal and unknowable.

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Marthe de Méligny wasn’t her real name. When she met the twenty-six-year-old Pierre Bonnard in 1893, she was twenty-four, claimed to be seventeen, and styled herself as an aristocrat. In truth, she was Maria Boursin, the daughter of a modest clerk from Saint-Amand-Montrond, an unremarkable town in central France. But it was not the last fiction she would inhabit. Over the next fifty years, Maria/Marthe became Bonnard’s most persistent and inscrutable subject, appearing in more than three hundred of his paintings—bathing, dressing, walking, or reclining in the filtered light of rooms that seem to hum with color and hush with memory. More than a muse, she became a presence. More than a presence, she became a question.

Bonnard met her just as he was drifting away from the clamorous ambitions of the avant-garde. Born in 1867 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a quiet suburb southwest of Paris, Bonnard had trained in law at the insistence of his father, a Ministry of War official. But the law never took. By 1888, he had joined a rebellious group of young artists called the Nabis—a Hebrew word meaning “prophets”—who looked to Paul Gauguin, Japanese prints, and esoteric symbolism rather than academic tradition. Alongside Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, Bonnard painted flattened domestic interiors, strange spiritual scenes, and ornamental landscapes with a sense of the decorative that bordered on the devotional.

But while others in the group pursued theory and mysticism, Bonnard remained interested in the everyday. He had a gift for noticing. The curve of a cat on a chair. A vase’s pale reflection on a tabletop. Light creeping across a wall. His early paintings show this sensitivity—patterned with curtains, carpets, and lamplight—but it was not until Marthe entered his life that the full weight of his attention settled. She does not so much appear in the work as haunt it. And she does not age. Across decades, Marthe’s body remains slender, half-hidden, anonymous. We see her mostly in the bath. Nude, crouched, her back to us, or submerged in water that fractures her into abstraction. What are we looking at, really?

Nude in the Bath, 1926. Oil on canvas, 105 x 65 cm

Bonnard never painted from life in the usual sense. He used memory, sketches, and photographs. He disliked the tyranny of the model, the frozen moment. “The presence of the object, the model, is a hindrance to the painter when he is painting,” he once said. “The point of departure for a painting being an idea—if the model is there at the start, one comes to terms with it, and not the idea.” So Marthe is not Marthe, not really. She is recollection. She is repetition. She is time, diffused.

They lived together for more than four decades, though Bonnard only married her in 1925. For much of that time, they lived quietly, and increasingly apart. Marthe suffered from a series of illnesses—respiratory, nervous, and possibly psychological. She was reclusive, often absent from social gatherings, and retreated into strict routines and long hours of bathing. Water, in her life and in Bonnard’s paintings, seems a kind of screen. It smooths over the self. It shimmers. It blurs.

This is the curious contradiction of Bonnard’s work: He painted intimacy as distance. Even the most private scenes—Marthe nude at the sink, or resting on a rumpled bed—seem as though observed from another room. The paintings shimmer with affection but resist closeness. Walls lean toward the viewer, colors vibrate, perspectives warp. The scenes quiver, like memory. What one feels is not voyeurism but a kind of temporal ache: the knowledge that this already passed. The bath is not a moment, but a memory of many such moments, worn down into a pattern.

And the patterns are everything. Bonnard never surrendered the decorative impulse that had shaped his early years. But what began as surface ornament became something deeper—a way of holding emotion. In his later paintings, the walls are almost more alive than the figures. Color floods everything. A yellow tablecloth glows like a lamp. A mauve shadow clings to a window. Marthe is sometimes barely there, part of the wallpaper, the tiles, the light. But that too is true to love—especially a long one. The person you share your life with becomes a texture of your life. They saturate the air. 

The Bath, 1925. Oil on canvas, 86 x 121 cm

Marthe was always difficult to know. Some of her letters survive, but they are mostly functional. We know she did not like Bonnard’s friends. We know she guarded their domestic world with quiet fierceness. And we know that she was not the only woman in his life. Bonnard had other relationships—most notably with Renée Monchaty, a young woman who modeled for him and with whom he fell deeply in love around 1921. He nearly left Marthe for her. Renée appears in some of his most luminous paintings, her presence distinct from Marthe’s—brighter, more direct. When Bonnard married Marthe in 1925, Renée killed herself in a hotel room, with Bonnard’s photograph in one hand and a gun in the other.

There is no record of Marthe’s reaction. She and Bonnard remained together, retreating into their shared world in Le Cannet, a hillside town just above Cannes in the south of France. The light there—soft, Mediterranean—infused the paintings of his final years. He kept working until his death in 1947, by which time he was nearly blind. Marthe had died in 1942, but in his last paintings, she is still there: bathing, dressing, dissolving into color.

Among the more than three hundred appearances Marthe made in Bonnard’s work, a few paintings stand out—not because they are definitive, but because they seem to contain, like layers of paint, all the contradictions of their relationship: tenderness and distance, intimacy and isolation, observation and forgetting. 

Nude Before a Mirror, 1931. Oil on canvas, 154 x 105 cm

The Bath (1925) is among Bonnard’s most serene and spatially uncertain works. Marthe lies nude in the tub, her form merging with the greenish water until body and bath become indistinct. Her head, resting gently on the porcelain rim, is the only clearly illuminated element—a quiet glow that contrasts with the liquid hush below. The tub’s edge acts like a picture frame within the picture, enclosing a world where time doesn’t move. At the bottom of the canvas, a fragment of rug or towel seems almost accidentally present, the only anchor in an otherwise weightless atmosphere. There is no narrative here, no cause or effect. This is not a scene so much as a sensation: bathing as dream-state, intimacy as abstraction.

The Bathroom (1932) immerses us in a radiant interior, dense with color, texture, and private ritual. Marthe is caught mid-motion, naked at her washbasin, the curve of her back softened into the rose and ocher tones that saturate the space. The room itself seems alive: blue-and-white tiles shimmer on the floor, patterned wallpaper pulses gently, every object—from bottles to towels—contributes to the hum. Nothing draws attention to itself, yet everything matters. At her feet lies their dachshund, Pouce, as if the animal alone remains tethered to reality. There’s no sense of performance. Marthe is not posing; she’s vanishing into the moment. It’s a painting not of a person but of the residue they leave behind.

Nude Before a Mirror (1931) opens with an almost theatrical setup: a woman, nude, standing before a mirror. But the mirror does not return her image. Marthe’s back, rendered in warm, mottled tones, is all we see—flesh without reflection, presence without confirmation. Bonnard, never drawn to literalness, uses the mirror not to reflect but to withhold. The space is narrow, almost airless, and the composition seems to close in on itself. We expect to see her face, but are instead left with absence, with an unsettling silence where identity might have been. What emerges is not a portrait but a meditation on vanishing: on how even the most intimate presence can slip beyond recognition.

Nude in Bathtub (1940–46) may be Bonnard’s most elegiac vision of Marthe. Her body is barely perceptible beneath the surface of a violet-blue bath. The form is so faint, so gently suggested, that she seems more remembered than painted. Around her, tiles swirl—cool mosaics below, warm grids above—while the bath itself remains still, a silent pool. There is no movement, no time. Marthe is not a subject, but an afterimage. The only solid presence is Pouce curled on the floor, the dog’s quiet watchfulness suggesting that someone was here. Once. Long ago. This is not voyeurism, but elegy. Water, memory, and color dissolve the body. Bonnard, painting this years after Marthe’s death, transforms the bathroom into a chapel. The image doesn’t represent Marthe—it mourns her.

By the time Bonnard painted this last piece, he was living alone in the villa Le Bosquet, their home in Le Cannet. Marthe had died during the war, in the midst of rationing, isolation, and illness. Bonnard, by then in his seventies, remained fiercely committed to painting. He worked from memory, photographs, and quick sketches. He refused to let the war into his work, just as he had kept modern life mostly at the edge of the frame. His subjects remained light, walls, tables, windows, Marthe.

Nude in Bathtub, 1940–46. Oil on canvas, 122 x 151 cm

In his last years, he would sometimes use opera glasses to study a canvas from a distance. Friends who visited described the house as quiet, cloistered. Bonnard painted in the mornings, ate little, and walked in the garden. He was never an artist of manifestos or bold statements. There is no Bonnard “theory,” only the slow, shimmering accumulation of experience rendered in color.

He died alone. The story goes that on his last canvas, The Almond Tree in Blossom, he returned to the garden, to the light, to the same vibrating surface he had chased for half a century. When Matisse heard of his death, he is said to have remarked, “He was the greatest of us all.”

Today, Bonnard’s work can seem out of step with our appetite for urgency and disruption. His paintings resist slogans, and they do not photograph well. They must be seen slowly. They require patience. They are not declarations, but reveries. Yet in that quietude, there is something radical: a way of seeing the domestic world not as mundane, but as charged—with memory, grief, color, and love.

And Marthe—she remains there, even now, in that tub, in the mirror, in the sunlit room. We don’t know her voice, and we’ll never really see her face. But through Bonnard’s eyes, we glimpse something else: a life lived beside another, long enough to become inseparable from the texture of things.

Claire Blanche (b. 1990 in Fontelune-de-Camélias, France) studied at the École du Louvre in Paris and writes about the quieter corners of art history—abandoned exhibitions, sidetracked careers, and other things museums forget to mention. Her work often returns to blind spots of the archive and stories that vanish between the lines. She now lives in Brussels, where she continues to follow threads no one else pulls.

Cover image: The Bathroom, 1932. Oil on canvas, 121 x 118 cm