Pierre Bonnard, who maintained a fairly consistent visual vocabulary for nearly five decades, noted in his journal that a “picture is a series of blotches which are joined together and finally form the object, the finished piece, over which the eye may wander completely unhindered.” This trajectory from paint to subject matter is on brilliant display in the monumental After the Meal. The composition is structured by the table legs, chair, sideboard, door at right, kitchen opening at left, and playful red stripes on the prominent white tablecloth. This linearity is reinforced by the careful placement of smaller objects such as wine bottles and carafes, as well as the detailed patterns on the floor and clothing. The only element to break the framework is the posture of the woman at right, identified as Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard’s longtime companion whom he married the year of this painting. Lifting an empty fruit dish, her bent figure opposes the rigid horizontal and vertical arrangement. Yet the artist’s palette choices—the hue of her red hair and striped shirt, the white and red stripes of her skirt—lock her into the grid of architecture and patterning.
Around the mid-1920s, Bonnard created a number of large interior scenes such as this one, with a table at center and minimal action. Remarking that his goal was “to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden,” he presents in these ambitious compositions more impression than specificity. They exude a sense of familiarity and memory, an understanding of what is there holistically, without a parsing of the individually observed parts.
2024
