Witness Accounts Angel Zarraga, a Mexican artist who had the opportunity to watch Bonnard at work in a hotel room at Cap d'Antibes in the early 1920s, gives the following description of Bonnard at work: "On the wall hung canvases of various sizes and proportions. During my first visit, all the canvases were white. The whole room radiated from them. When I came back a few days later, I saw on every one of them a few colorful accents whose pictorial meaning was not at all recognizable. I guessed in part what Bonnard then explained to me. When he begins a picture his composition is not immediately established. [...] He simply walks back and forth between the white surfaces, waits for an idea, sets there a tone, there a brush stroke, puts several streaks on a third canvas. After a little while [...] he goes for a walk, then [...] returns quickly to his room. Seemingly at random, he sets down here and there, on one picture and another, a few accents which had meanwhile become clear to him and then goes for another walk in order to relax and gather his energies for another attack. Weeks, even months pass in this way. [...] Three months later I was again in his room. On the walls I saw half a dozen finished and wonderfully resolved pictures." James Thrall Soby, James Elliott, and Monroe Wheeler, Bonnard and His Environment (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1964), p. 18. ©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York