Bonnard found early fame among the Nabis, the radical young disciples of Gauguin, and went on with Vuillard to create a new intimist art of psychologically charged interiors. But from 1900 he `turned back` towards impressionism, and his art recreates moments of heightened subjectivity, colour and space intensified in ecstatic perception. His greatest works explore his claustrophic relationship with Marthe, his wife. In his seventies he completed some of the most poignant self-portraits in Western art.

Shaped in the 1890 – by Mallarmé and Symbolism, by Jarry and anarchism, but the philosophy of Bergson – Bonnard`s complex art took on full conviction only in the 1920s. His reassessment pver the past thirty years has centred on these extraordinary late pictures, which are among the most enduring images of the twentieth century.

This new account shows how these beautiful and lyrical pictures sometimes emerged from terrible circumstances; as Bonnard himself wrote shortly before his death in 1947, `one does not always sing of happiness`.