About this work
A peculiar three-part passage leads the viewer's eye into *Dressing Table and Mirror*. The still life holds the gaze first — the bottles of perfume, the bouquet in a vase, and an almost careless scattering of withered orange flowers arranged atop the dressing table.
The table itself is shrouded in a purple-toned fabric rendered with visible, tactile brushwork, echoed by a patterned blue wall behind it. Then the eye climbs to the mirror. The mirror view is strangely dense — it shows a male nude, a crumpled bed, a lacy curtain whipped by wind, a dachshund on a cloth of red.
As ever, the artist himself is nowhere to be seen, unless of course that headless figure is male rather than female. The canvas holds two worlds simultaneously: the orderly still life of the surface and the intimate disorder reflected back from behind.
The work was created around 1913, executed in oil on canvas, and now belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
It was first shown publicly at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1913, where it was exhibited under the title *"La toilette au bouquet rouge et jaune"* — the dressing table with a bunch of red and yellow flowers. By this point Bonnard had not abandoned his sustained fascination with mirror play, nor had he removed his easel from the more private rooms of the house.
Between 1905 and 1916, he regularly painted his models in front of a mirror and played games with their reflections — using the device to double, fragment, and withhold the figure. The painting unfolds step by step; despite its sunny light and charming domestic pets, the things that happen in it are not wholly reassuring.
Though pleasantness may seem the central theme, it is everywhere darkened by what one critic called "the pathos of evanescence" — what Proust achieved in prose, Bonnard achieved in paint.
This is a painting for someone who looks twice. It rewards a wall with breathing room — a bedroom or a dressing room of its own, naturally, but equally a study or a quiet hallway where the eye can wander back to it. The scale of the original (nearly a square meter of canvas) means that even a fine art print carries presence. It suits interiors that mix the decorated with the plain: a room with pattern on a single wall, warm afternoon light, and no need to resolve everything at once. Collectors drawn to the post-Impressionist tradition — and to art that hides more than it shows — will find this one of Bonnard's most psychologically layered domestic scenes.
