Socks are also knitted by circles of usually well-meaning, stalwart ladies for soldiers and charities, but there may also be other dynamics at play. In The Making of a Marchioness, the gentle, good-natured Emily Fox-Seton is drawn into a sophisticated group which knits for a Deep-Sea Fishermen's charity but "she was not strong enough to stand the realisation that she had become part of a web into which she had not meant to be knitted" - and what a page-turner the rest of the story is. The painting is Young Woman Knitting (c1883, The Met) by Berthe Morisot. 

Many socks in Persephone books are not knitted with love but with a cheerless sense of duty. To be fair, the need to keep supplying socks for others people's feet must, at times, have felt like a never-ending spiral of knitting in the round. In a marvellous phrase in her childhood memoir, The Other Day, Dorothy Whipple recalls her aunt's 'grim companion' knitting 'iron-grey socks on murderous steel needles'.

This week on the Post we have socks and sock-knitting, themes which run through so many Persephone books written at a time when it was a major task to keep a family's feet warm and dry. Some knitters, such as Louisa in Greenbanks, do this with love. She knits for her adored but wayward son in South Africa - she thinks the socks there can't be good enough for him - and in the past has washed his socks herself in secret (technically it's a maid's job), carefully pulling the toes out to make sure they dry properly. The painting is A Woman Knitting (mid-C20, unknown artist).

The exhibition is called Bonnard and the Nordics and it includes numerous paintings by Scandinavian artists who were influenced by Bonnard, such as Arne Kavli (1878-1970) - this is Woman on the Garden Stairs (1938, private collection). Just as Bonnard did at Le Cannet, Kavli painted the same familiar subjects over and over again at his summer house at Rønnes in Southern Norway. "Like his great role model...he filled the surface with shapes and colours, but did not let the individual observations or the richness of detail dominate and thereby disrupt the overall decorative impression."

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) is so often associated with vibrant colour, patterned interiors, and shimmering landscapes, that it is easy to forget that he was also inspired by the urban busyness of Paris. This is Place Clichy (1922, various collections) a lithograph which illustrates Bonnard's stylistic modernity - his prints prefigure work in the 1950s by artists such as John Minton.  

In contrast to the Tate Modern exhibition in 2019 which focussed heavily on his nudes in baths and elicited mixed reviews, the National Museum exhibition is cleverly curated to show Bonnard's immense range of subjects and processes. He emerges as an artist with a fine sense of humour and an enjoyment of family life. This lithograph is Family Scene (1893), a copy of which is in The Met: "Bonnard’s inclusion of his own profile at lower right, against the checkered pattern of his sister Andrée’s dress, demonstrates his delight in the close observation of his first nephew, Jean, born in May 1892". 

The cherry blossom is out now in the Kungsträdgården in Stockholm mirroring the blossom painted by Bonnard. This is L'Amandier (c1930), the almond tree in the garden of Le Cannet (now the Musée Bonnard which holds this painting), and it was also the subject of his last painting in 1945. Like Vincent Van Gogh and David Hockney who were also drawn to spring blossom late in life, Bonnard said, ‘Every spring it forces me to paint it’.