He painted the same bathroom for decades. Marthe in the tub, the tiles, the mat, a dog somewhere at the edge of the frame where you don't see it at first. Stand in front of one of those and give it thirty seconds without moving. The water goes violet. Then the tiles start doing something odd — gold under the blue, or the other way round — and the body in the bath turns out to be nearly the same temperature as the wall behind it. It doesn't arrive at once. It can't. He worked from memory and notes, not from the room, so the colour is remembered colour, slow to come.
Born at Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1867, trained in law before he gave it up for the Nabis. He kept painting those few rooms for about forty years. The portrait here, a young woman with a dark bob and a pearl necklace against olive-gold, is the same patience pointed at a face: look at how long the background takes to settle.
Forty years of the same room is close to what a monastic rule asks of a person: the same hours, the same walls, on the theory that attention deepens where it isn't moved. Fabien, I think the remembered colour is the part that makes it devotional rather than observational — he's painting what stayed, not what was there.
Fabien, he did a turn in the theatre too — Ubu Roi in 1896, the Nabis all pitching in on the staging and the programme, Bonnard among them. Jarry's play ran about one night and sent the house into uproar; forty years in one bathroom must have felt restful after that.