Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) was a French painter who is considered one of the most influential figures in the transition between Impressionism and Modernism. He began his career as a member of the Les Nabis group, a circle of young artists who were inspired by Paul Gauguin's color symbolism and the desire to free painting from the exact depiction of nature.

Over time, Bonnard developed a highly personal style, characterized by warm colors, subtle lighting effects, and intimately everyday subjects—interiors, still lifes, gardens, and scenes from private life. He often worked from memory rather than direct observation, which gave his paintings a dreamlike, almost poetic character.

His importance for modern painting lies primarily in the way he treated color and light as independent means of expression rather than as tools for realistic representation. Through his sensitive sense of color and compositional freedom, he paved the way for later modernists such as Matisse and Rothko, and his work has had a great influence on both color expressionism and lyrical abstraction.

He is considered one of the most important color and light painters in the history of modern art. Internationally, he is seen as a bridge between impressionism and modern color art, influencing artists such as Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn and David Hockney. His work can be found in the world's largest museums - MoMA, Tate Modern, Musée d'Orsay, National Gallery of Art and others.

His sculptures were usually small, intimate, and representational, often of animals or human figures. They have the same sense of intimacy, softness, and simplified forms as his paintings, rather than the dramatic movement found in contemporary sculptors such as Rodin.
For Bonnard, sculpture was a side track rather than a main road. He probably saw it as a way to understand form and volume, which in turn influenced his painting—especially his way of creating space and physicality with color rather than line.
Few of his sculptures survive or are exhibited. A few smaller works are attributed to him, but they are rare and do not have the same central place in his legacy as his paintings and graphic works.

The catalogue raisonné of Pierre Bonnard's sculptures, "Bonnard the Sculptor," was compiled by Anne Pingeot and published in 2006 by the Musée d'Orsay and Nicolas Chaudun (Paris). After modeling puppets for Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi," the artist responded to the wish of the renowned art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who asked artists to express themselves in an unfamiliar technique in order to challenge their genius. The study of Bonnard's sculptures, as we will discover, transformed into a veritable investigation. After Vollard's death and during the interminable Bonnard estate proceedings, nothing followed a regular course. The artist's models were stolen, and their bronze casts were produced clandestinely. The poverty of the post-war period, and particularly that of sculptors, may explain these successive twists and turns. Fifteen sculptures, or sometimes simply sculpture projects, are "tracked down" and studied here according to the elements known to the author to date. "Bonnard's incursion into the field of sculpture, which, although brief, is nonetheless important," writes Antoine Terrasse in his preface. "Rodin et la chaste Suzanne" ( page 126 ) is one of these fifteen an casted after Pierre Bonnard death in 1048 under the supervision of Jean Osouf at Valsuani Foundry in Paris.