The starting point for the exhibition is Pierre Bonnard’s final diary entry, written shortly before his death in 1947:

I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly.

All of the invited artists have thought about Bonnard in different ways, perhaps using his work a little, or at least thinking about it in relation to their own, though what they do with those thoughts is very different. Many of the painters in this exhibition make works that exist in the hinterland between experience and memory: the gap between how we remember things and how they are.

“I have my subjects all at hand. I go see them. I take notes. And then I go home. And before painting, I think, I dream.”

(Pierre Bonnard, 1942)

“Bonnard feels colour with all his senses: temperature, touch, smell, sound. I have synaesthesia, and I bet he did as well. His paintings show how it feels to be in a body: in a bathtub, in a landscape, on a veranda, at a breakfast table. And we never see just one moment. His paintings feel like time in multiple dimensions: past, present, future, and imagined.”

(Hayley Barker)

“Bonnard’s bath paintings blew me away when I first saw them on an art school trip to Paris in 1991 (a bus from Aberdeen). Paintings as dream, floating ephemeral watery dream, Marthe’s body sometimes barely visible, as if there had been a fusion at a molecular level of bath and person… [Picasso’s] Guernica is a great painting and arguably more important than any of Bonnard’s bath paintings, but I don’t think about Guernica much. I think about Bonnard every time I’m in a bathroom.”

(Andrew Cranston)

“In Bonnard’s hands, colour becomes more than a tool for representation; it serves as a means of distillation, capturing not just the surface of the image but the essence of life itself. Light is pitted against dark, vibrant against muted, and hard against soft. Within the flickering brushwork, our attention is drawn to these delicate visual harmonies and tensions, as if the transformation of paint from liquid to solid is unfolding before our eyes."

(Michael Clarence)

Portrait of Helena Foster. Photograph: Anna Francesca Jennings. “Bonnard is a painter who is present, attentive, and always open to new information revealing itself to him. His depiction of light, and the abundance of colours that ground his paintings in a particular locale, has enriched my own perspective on capturing the specificity of time and place. Whether drawn from memory, imagination, or the dreamscape of the subconscious, his work resonates with this essence.”

(Helena Foster)

"Bonnard paintings have a wonderful sense of doubt and incompleteness, a feeling that those feathery brush strokes could continue to move and change once your back is turned. He leaves these unexpected holes in his compositions for the viewer to fall into and trip over, this keeps you coming back, for such seemingly innocuous scenes they ask so many questions."

(Nick Goss)

“Where do I start ? The panoramic seeing, the tablecloths, the tiles in the bathroom? The nude laying back on the bed - he never doesn’t astonish me with his new way of seeing -the light that is colour, Marthe’s bent head or her high heels in the bathroom, or some plum pits on a plate - his every day.”

(Chantal Joffe)

“A while ago I read how he works only from memory, going out on walks to gather information. And he described seeing from behind his eyes, of capturing the way a first glimpse of a room feels, and the urgency to get that down, the time between seeing it and painting it captured behind his eyelids. It was very freeing and wonderful to read and has stayed in my mind - his work has that authentic distorted response that memory so often has.”

(Aubrey Levinthal)

“Bonnard is a colour genius – it oozes out of his paintings, seeping through cracks, layered, and blended in a kind of luminous harmony. His textures ripple, there is a fluidity, the works are alive.”

(Sophia Loeb)

"I see light in his marks, running across the canvas in all directions. I imagine the sound his brush might have made, from the moment it touches the canvas to when it lifts away. I see and hear the sounds of light, which seems to shiver in his paintings… perhaps what draws me most to Bonnard's work is how his immediate surroundings - trees, meadows or flowers could be enough reason to paint."

(Shota Nakamura)

"I first saw a Bonnard when I was 18 on a college trip to London. I was anticipating seeing his work in particular, as I had a postcard of one of his paintings in my sketchbook, and I had a dream about trying to see and touch them, they were so beautiful. They didn’t disappoint. I felt so excited at all the possibilities in painting.

I recently looked at Bonnard at the museum D’Orsay in Paris, and experienced again that profound joy of looking at what we sometimes can’t see -the absolute beauty of life in it’s stillness, every dayness imbued with this aura of feeling, dream-like."

(Lorna Robertson )

“Bonnard is a supreme example of what I’m most interested in: painting what something feels like, rather than what it looks like. All his subjects are imbued with the uniqueness of perception, capturing the simple but extraordinary fact of being alive. I see his use of colour as being inseparable from subject and form - a way of thinking with paint: a diffused scattering of brush marks, often built up to a crescendo of resting, more opaque, areas of pigment.”

(Phoebe Unwin)

“It was Bonnard’s sketches and notebooks that first caught my attention as a student, his tiny speckled and scratched pages that were yet to become those luscious oscillating colours, of casual table arrangements and balmy interiors.

It was how Bonnard reconciled these tenuous origins with colour, made this evanescence permanent with an intimacy that is both lyrical and fleeting, a quality which lasted throughout his lifetime, from the earliest depictions of Marthe to the melancholy of his late portraits, staring into the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror. Structural elements barely contained his marvellous invention. It’s a magician's touch which still baffles and beguiles me to this day.”

(Joel Tomlin)