Pierre Bonnard, a luminary of the late 19th and early 20th century art world, was deeply captivated by the aesthetics of Japonism, the Western fascination with Japanese art and culture. While many of his contemporaries explored the bold, graphic aspects of Japanese prints, Bonnard absorbed a more nuanced, intimate understanding of the style, weaving it seamlessly into his own unique artistic vision. His paintings and prints reveal a delicate dance with Japanese aesthetics, marked by specific and recurring elements.

Even a child needs a room of her own. Mine was a square of light on the floor of the living room. At dawn, I opened one of my parent’s two art books and placed it in the square. The dust lit by the eastern morning light swirled before me as I squatted akimbo; my knees bent flat to the floor in the shape of an M. I leaned my torso forward and pressed my face into the color reproductions of Fifty Centuries of Art. Here in the tiny landscapes behind Roger Van Der Weyden’s Madonna and the curtained Dutch rooms of Vermeer, worlds opened up to me that are at once more vivid and appealing than the one I lived in.

Like Alice, I longed to be on the other side. I wanted to live inside a painting.