In January 1910, through the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Ivan Morozov commissioned two paintings of Parisian life from Bonnard, leaving the artist free in the choice of subject. Morning and its companion piece Evening depict a part of the city that the artist recorded many times in the period 1893–1912. Here, at the intersection of the Boulevards Clichy and Batignolles, his studio was located. There is no narrative line in the painting. Bonnard simply enumerates the signs of morning. The foreground is given over to those who have to get up early: an old coalman, girls hurrying to work, a little schoolboy who, incidentally, seems in no hurry. The boy with a big book and a huge scarf resembles the artist himself: "I see myself again, wrapped up, heading for the neighbouring lycee for eight o’clock, in the fog, in the grey cotton-wool of wintertime Paris," Bonnard wrote.