Nude in the Bath is among Pierre Bonnard’s most remarkable compositions, described by one observer as a ‘disturbing and erotic image’. Painted in the mid 1920s, it is typically rich in its chromatic range and shows the influence of photography on the artist in his use of instantaneity and cropping. Though truncated, the two figures that inhabit the domestic space – the bather and a standing figure at the left margin – are familiar from Bonnard’s other works as Marthe (Maria Boursin), the painter’s companion and model from 1893, and Bonnard himself. The painting is part of a series of works in which he depicted Marthe preparing for, immersed in or emerging from the bath, consistently imagining her as her youthful self. The presence of the self-portrait lends Nude in the Bath a psychological charge, while the lifeless quality of the bather’s inverted body and tomb-like tub instil a fatalistic atmosphere into the interior scene.