Hi, I'm Cindy Kang. I'm the Associate Curator at the Barnes Foundation. And we are here in room sticks on the first floor, looking at a painting that is way over the door. This one here. Pierre Bonard's Young Woman Writing. So this format is great for being able to zoom in virtually and provide you all with an opportunity to look at something that you can't see that well in the galleries actually. And I've been thinking more about this painting these days because we've actually been doing more letter writing. I think there's something about slowing down and staying home and not being able to physically get together with friends and family that has encouraged us to get back to a more old-fashioned way of connecting because there's something still so intimate about receiving a handwritten letter. So Bonard's painting shows a woman hunched over one end of a table intensely focused on her writing. She seems to be by herself in a dining room given that this is a large rounded table covered in a red table cloth. And in the background, there is a sideboard on the left here. On the right there is a wonderfully multicolored upholstered chair. And in the middle, a beautiful, pearlescent, grayed light streams in through that gauzy, curtained window. So it's daytime and maybe slightly overcast outside. I'm imagining one of those severely beautiful gray days in Paris. On the table, there are many pieces of paper that are strewn across the red table cloth. They form a kind of pattern or composition in themselves while also attesting to the intensity of her writing process. It looks like she has gone through multiple drafts of the letter that she is writing and then tossed them all over the table. So Bonard French artist painted this work in 1908 after taking multiple trips to the Netherlands in the preceding years. He was with friends and he was visiting museums and other art collections. And I wonder if he was inspired by 17th century Dutch pictures of letter writing that he might have seen because it was Dutch painters like Vermeer, Terbore, Gabrielle Metzou, who really established letter writing as a subject of genre painting in the 17th century. So letter writing at that time was a pretty mundane activity of everyday life like email, like texting. But these Dutch paintings made it really the center of narrative tension. They made it imply often a love story and letter writing became a symbol of interiority where you would, you know, pour out all of your inner thoughts and feelings. So we have here Bonard's woman furiously scribbling and we can wonder who is she writing to and what is she writing? Is it a love letter? Does this empty chair in the background perhaps hint at the absence of another person? Or is she ready to a friend or a relative or even an enemy? Is it a letter of good news or bad news? Anger or passion or maybe she's even trying to compose a poem and can't get the words right? Who knows? Who really knows? But the way Bonard lays on paint helps to convey a sense of urgency in this ephemeral moment of daily life. So first of all, the work is done on paperboard that has been lined onto canvas. And you can see some of the exposed support in the corners here. If you can just barely get that in the corner, but perhaps better here in the middle where you can see it in the window, this exposed ground as part of the composition, they helped it convey a sense of transparency. So this primary support material, this paperboard, was not a particularly fancy fine art material. It's a more work-a-day material that I think can be associated with Bonard's earlier work. So in his early career, Bonard actually designed a lot of ephemeral media. So he designed posters, he designed theater programs, he even decorated sheet music. So this paperboard support is, I think, part of this context of his work in material culture or the transitory stuff of life. Now let's look at the way he painted the sheets of paper. Here, you can see broad, quick wet strokes or sometimes in the case of these sheets. There's a more layered and kind of messy and pasto quality to them. You can see, however, that their placement was very much planned. So Bonard left in reserve these rectangular areas in the red tablecloth that he would then paint the sheets of paper into. And this particular detail is fun because you can see a few black strokes that delineate an envelope that Bonard then messily dabbed over with white paint. So this painting has the feeling and quality of a rough sketch and all the intimacy and immediacy that such an approach conveys. So it's like the first draft of an impassioned letter. And we can also see that Bonard has gone back into his painting and edited it in the corner here in this chair. I don't know if you can see it's perhaps hard to see in this image, but in raking light, you can definitely see that he changed the position of the chair, that the chair legs and the chair back used to be further back. And then finally, he signed it here at the bottom left. And he signed it and then sent it out into the world. So that wraps up today's Barnes takeout. I hope this work and others at the Barnes helps to keep you inspired and creative as we continue to stay at home. If you haven't already, subscribe to our channel. And you can also leave a comment down below because of course we love hearing from you. Thanks for watching.