Order and Science

Paul Cézanne

The Large Bathers

1900–06

Oil on canvas, 210.5 × 250.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Nude women gather on a riverbank beneath tall, leaning trees. It is the largest and last of his pictures of bathers in a landscape, a lifelong theme.

• The figures are simplified into sturdy, block-like shapes and grouped into a broad pyramid. Younger painters, Picasso among them, studied this kind of structure closely.
• It was shown at a Paris retrospective in 1907, the year after the artist died.
• Look at the trees, which lean inward to form a pointed arch over the river.
• He worked on it for years and left it unfinished at his death.
• The museum bought it in 1937 through the W. P. Wilstach Fund.

He made three large bathers pictures late in life; the others are at the Barnes Foundation and the National Gallery, London. He almost never worked from a live nude model.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art