Known for painting light-soaked interiors, nudes and still lives, Pierre Bonnard’s lush canvases echo Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. Bonnard played a central role in Nabis, a group emphasizing the basic aesthetic properties of painting. Describing his method, Bonnard has said, “the principal subject is the surface, which has its color, its laws over and above those of object.” Rather than simply observe and reproduce the world around him, Bonnard sought to instill each picture with, in the words of Nabis colleague Maurice Denis, “a beauty outside nature.”