Bathers
Cezanne

Painted 1898-1906
Full title "Bathers(Les Grandes Bai gneuses)"
Canvas, 127.2 x 196.1 cm

Cezanne worked on the motif of bathers in small-scale works from the 1870s on wards, and made numerous compositions of both male and female bathers, singly or in groups.

In his last decade he painted three large-scale works of groups of female bathers.

When exhibited in 1970, the painting became an inspiration for the nascent Cubist movment; both Picasso and Matisse took a strong interest in it.

"I have often done studies of bathers, both male and female, which I would have liked to make into a full-scale work done from nature:
lack of models forced me to to limit myself to these sketches. Various obstacles stood in my way, such as finding the right place to use as a setting, a place which would not be very different from the one I had fixed upon in my mind , or assembling a lot of people together, or finding men and women who would be willing to undress and remain still in the poses I had decided upon."
Cezanne to Emile Bernard

In his pictures of bathers Cezanne was reinterpreting a long tradition of compositions with nude figures in landscapes by artists such as Titian and Poussin. The subject of these works were taken from classical myths.

Cezanne does not use a direct literary source. Instead his central theme appears to be the harmony of the figures and the landscape expressed through the rock-like forms and the earthy colouring of the bathers.