Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, member of the group of artists called the Nabis and afterward a leader of the Intimists; he is generally regarded as one of the greatest colorists of modern art. His characteristically intimate, sunlit domestic interiors and still lifes include The Dining Room (1913) and Bowl of Fruit (c. 1933). After taking his baccalaureate, in which he distinguished himself in classics, Bonnard studied law at the insistence of his father, and for a short time in 1888 he worked in a government office. In the meantime he attended the École des Beaux-Arts, but, failing to win the Prix de Rome (a prize to study at the French Academy in Rome), he transferred to the Académie Julian, where he came into contact with some of the major figures of the new artistic generation—Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, and Félix Vallotton. In 1890, after a year’s military service, he shared a studio in Montmartre with Denis and Vuillard. Later they were joined by the theatrical producer Aurélien Lugné-Poë, with whom Bonnard collaborated on productions for the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, in Paris. At this time he became influenced by Japanese prints, which had earlier attracted the Impressionists. During the 1890s Bonnard became one of the leading members of the Nabis, a group of artists who specialized in painting intimate domestic scenes as well as decorative curvilinear compositions akin to those produced by painters of the contemporary Art Nouveau movement. Bonnard’s pictures of charming interiors lighted by oil lamps, nudes on voluptuous beds, and Montmartre scenes made him a recorder of France’s Belle Époque. It was typical of his humor and taste for urban life at the time that he illustrated Petites scènes familières and Petit solfège illustré (1893), written by his brother-in-law Claude Terrasse, and executed the lithograph series Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (“Aspects of Paris Life”), which was issued by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1899. He also contributed illustrations to the celebrated avant-garde review La Revue blanche. A new phase in book illustration was inaugurated with Bonnard’s decoration of the pages in Paul Verlaine’s book of Symbolist poetry, Parallèlement, published by Vollard in 1900. He undertook the illustration of other books during the 1900s.