A French painter and printmaker, Pierre Bonnard was a post-impressionist, and founding member of the avant-garde group Les Nabis. Bonnard lived an uneventful childhood, and entered into the University of Paris in 1896 to study law.

One year later, Bonnard enrolled in the Academie Julian, a liberal Parisian art school, where he met Paul Serusier, Maurice Denis, Henri Ibels, and Paul Ransom. The five friends, all of similar artistic inclination, joined together to form Les Nabis, a group of avant-garde post-impressionist painters.

The first exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s works was in 1891, at the Salon des Independants, and the first exhibition of the work of the Nabis in the same year. In addition to paintings, Bonnard was a prolific artist, producing furniture and textile deigns, puppets for puppet shows, painted screens, stage sets, and illustrated books.

After 1900, he began spending more time in the countryside between Normandy and Paris, producing a great number of landscapes. Beginning in 1906, Pierre Bonnard began his annual one-man exhibitions at an art firm that had exclusive rights to his works, which were traditionally impressionistic, albeit with an enhance color palette.

Before the beginning of World War I, Bonnard traveled extensively throughout Europe and North Africa, although his paintings were not indicative of his experiences there. The same went for the trials and tribulations of World War I, of which there is no reference in his paintings.

Pierre Bonnard continued to create major exhibitions of his work, traveling to the United States, commissioned to paint the French pavilion at the Exposition Universeilles in Paris in 1937. Source: Wikiart.