Pierre Bonnard, the French painter and printmaker, is generally regarded as one of the greatest colorists of modern art. He was one of the first artists to use pure color in flat patterns enlivened by decorative linear arabesques, leading into the emergence of Art Nouveau movement in the late 1890s.

Pierre Bonnard, the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War, was born to a middle-class family, the middle child of three. He led a relatively happy and care-free childhood but when it became time for study, upon the insistence of his father, Pierre studied law. He graduated and practiced briefly as a lawyer before deciding to become an artist.

After meeting Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in 1891 and showing his work for the first time in 1896, Bonnard became one of the leading members of the Nabis (Hebrew for "prophets"), a small group of artists who specialized in painting intimate domestic scenes as well as decorative curvilinear compositions akin to those being produced by painters of the contemporary Art Nouveau movement.

Pierre Bonnard was a good example of someone who studied nineteenth century French painting and turned it into something new. He saw technical control as the basis of expression and used what he saw as a means to guard against errors of the past.

Bonnard was known for his intense use of color and the complexity of his compositions. He was greatly influenced by the Japanese print styles and often drew on them for his striking simplifications of form and his bold use of bright colors. He ultimately adopted the Impressionists style of broken brushstroke and abandoned the linear configurations seen in his early work.

He was not a conventional painter by any stretch of the imagination. He did not paint directly from life but instead used memory and drawings to form the starting point of a painting. He never made any sketches in color. He did, however, note the intensity of a color. Nor did use a studio. Every room was a studio. He had no easel but instead placed his canvases on the wall with thumbtacks and used a small bamboo table to hold his brushes, with a chipped plate for his colors.

By the 1920's, his paintings continued to increase in color intensity and luminosity but essentially his style remained unchanged for the rest of his life. Never, however, does the freshness of his perception and his treatment of subject seem to lessen. The late works he created in the years before his death in 1947, show the same richness as the paintings Pierre Bonnard used throughout his life.