Extract from Dear Jeff... by Joanna Skipwith
...
I cannot tell you much about the actual application of paint (except that it was sometimes a brush and sometimes a fingertip) or the series of decisions that led from lilac to vermilion, but I can tell you something about the atmosphere and the passage of time in that private, now so public, room.
I was always the other side of the canvas with my back to Pierre, unable to gauge his progress. The brushstrokes were certainly close and personal. Pierre sat right behind me, his chair crammed awkwardly into the corner of the room, the stretcher resting on the bath's rim.
I lay in that bath hour after hour, week after week, and then the weeks stretched into months. In the earlier paintings, Pierre would sketch me quickly and then transfer his impression to a canvas in the studio. But with this particular painting, something eluded him. It was as if his memory was fading, and he could not preserve those colour sensations, not for a day, or a morning or even the short walk to his studio. So there I lay, like an Egyptian mummy, arms by my side of course, always by my side, following the lines of my body. I swear Pierre would rather have married Venus de Milo. No, even better, an anonymous classical sculpture, armless, hairless and preferably headless. But I came with a pair of most inconvenient arms and a head that complained rather too often. My complaints were never as annoying as my arms though. They were my secret weapon. I simply had to stand in a doorway with my hands on my hips. Childish defiance I know, but very effective. Nothing annoyed Pierre more than the angle of my elbow.
...
click here to view Nude in Bathroom [Le
cabinet de toilette], (1932) by Pierre Bonnard, in
the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York