Place Vintimille by Edouard Vuillard


Pierre Bonnard, Femmes au Jardin, 1891, distemper on paper attached to canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, © Réunion des Musées Nationaux, photograph by Hervé Lewandowski

Bonnard was the first of the Nabis to make a folding screen. In Femmes au Jardin, he used four equal panels with related but not contiguous imagery. Each panel contains a separate painting of a stylishly dressed woman. Only the busy patterns of the dresses and backgrounds tie the four together. Bonnard, known as the "Nabi très japonard," borrowed patterns, like the decorative wave motif in the second panel, from Japanese prints.