The Bathers

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The Bathers: Paul Cezanne

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Work Overview: The Bathers
Artist Paul Cézanne
Year 1898–1905
Medium Oil-on-canvas
Dimensions 210.5 cm × 250.8 cm ( 82 7⁄8 in × 98 3⁄4 in)
Location Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, United States

The Bathers (French: Les Grandes Baigneuses) is an oil painting by French artist Paul Cézanne first exhibited in 1906. The painting is the largest of a series of "Bather" paintings by Cézanne; the others are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, National Gallery, London, the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the Art Institute of Chicago.[1][2][3][4] Occasionally referred to as the Big Bathers or Large Bathers to distinguish it from the smaller works, the painting is considered one of the masterpieces of modern art,[2][5] and is often considered Cézanne's finest work.[6]

Cézanne worked on the painting for seven years, and it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1906.[7] The painting was purchased in 1937 for $110,000 with funds from a trust fund for the Philadelphia Museum of Art by their major benefactor Joseph E. Widener.[1][2] It was previously owned by Leo Stein.[8]

With each version of the bathers, Cézanne moved away from the traditional presentation of paintings, intentionally creating works which would not appeal to the novice viewer.[9] He did this in order to avoid fleeting fads and give a timeless quality to his work, and in so doing paved the way for future artists to disregard current trends and paint pieces which would appeal equally to all generations.[9] The abstract nude females present in Large Bathers give the painting tension and density.[9] It is exceptional among his work in symmetrical dimensions, with the adaptation of the nude forms to the triangular pattern of the trees and river.[10] Using the same technique as employed in painting landscapes and still lifes, Large Bathers is reminiscent of the work of Titian and Peter Paul Rubens.[11] Comparisons are also often made with the other famous group of nude women of the same period, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.[12][13]

The purchase of the painting, while generally praised, was nevertheless questioned by The Philadelphia Record, which noted that 41,000 (or ten percent) of Philadelphia's residents were without bathtubs, and that the money could therefore have been better spent elsewhere.[2] While Cézanne's drawing ability has always been criticized, a critic once said that he "made the ineptly drawn Bathers a warm evocation of leisurely summer bliss."[14] The painting was featured in the BBC Two series 100 Great Paintings.

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Paul Cézanne created a series of bathers' paintings at the end of his career. The Large Bathers is so called because it was Cézanne's largest composition in the series, and it was the last to be produced.

When creating The Large Bathers Cézanne was attempting to produce a piece that would be timeless. The artist did not follow fashionable painting trends and felt no pressure to conform to nineteenth century methods.

The story that some critics have told describes the women in The Large Bathers as goddesses in the middle of nature. The trees are acting as their theater and the figures in the background are watching their actions. There is a distinct triangle shape that forces the viewer to focus on the lake and the small figures in the background. Despite the movement in the picture there is a sense of calm among the bathers. The viewer appears to take a voyeuristic peek into their private world.

Cézanne's scene, with its tranquil lake and church tower is not an exact representation of a real village. Cézanne created this image using his imagination and drawing from nature. The artist enjoyed painting landscapes and was inspired by nature but he wanted to understand it and paint more than what was on the surface.

Paul Cézanne prepared a number of practice paintings of figures before he started working on The Large Bathers. He experimented with how he wanted the figures to relate to each other and preparatory pieces show the bathers interacting with each other in various different ways.

Despite it's unpolished state The Large Bathers is considered a masterpiece of modern art and has appeared on television shows as one of the greatest compositions of all time.
Paul Cézanne was influenced by a number of things when creating The Large Bathers. Firstly the artist had spent his early years in Paris at the Louvre museum, copying the paintings of the great masters. In the halls of one of the largest art museums in the world he saw the fantastic mystical paintings by artists such as Botticelli, Titian and Rubens. The God's, cherubs and mystical creatures of the Renaissance all inspired him to create scenes such as this one.

The calm waters in The Large Bathers and the slow movement of the figures all lend a mythical element to the work.

The nature and the small town in the background of the image were inspired by Aix-en-Provence. Paul Cézanne had grown up in this small town and even after moving to Paris he was attached to the countryside and his childhood surroundings. He spent many years traveling between the city and the countryside and Aix-en-Provence appeared in many of his works.

Composition:
The bather's are bordered by tress on either side of them. Each person is lent inward, making a triangle shape and framing the lake. Cézanne did this to keep his nudes in pre-determined spaces. For this painting there are at least twenty practice compositions of the different bathers and their varying poses.

The foreground of The Large Bathers is filled with figures and the nudes are mirroring each other. In the center the bather are knelt down with their arms leaning toward each other. The nudes looking toward the lagoon draw the viewer's attention to the people in the backdrop.

Color palette:
In The Large Bathers Cézanne has used light and dark blues, mixed with gold and bright white colors to create a sunny yet cloudy sky that appears to reach down to the small village. The trunks of the trees have been fashioned with golden honey and oak brown tones.

Each bather's skin color is complimented with a mane of chestnut brown hair and areas that have not been worked on, which signify where the light bounces off of their skin, are bright white. There are also shades of midnight blue and gray that are cleverly mixed into the skin. These shades help to give the skin depth and create contours, for example around the breasts. Additionally darker nut browns are used to shade the hips and backs, creating womanly forms.

Use of light:
Overall The Large Bathers is a well-lit piece. The bathers are illuminated from the right hand side of the painting, which obvious from the small amount of light that is hitting the bathers on the right. The bather who is crouched down has light hitting the elbow of her left arm and the underside of her thigh. However the nude on the left hand side of the painting, who is fully stretched out in front of the lake, is entirely illuminated by a white light. Both the bather's torso and her leg are luminescent, almost as though Cézanne has left his painting unfinished.

Mood, tone and emotion:
The tone of Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers is mystical. However, this mystical tone is confused by the figure swimming in the lake. The calm waters have been disturbed by the ripples.

Brush stroke:
Paul Cézanne liked to use an obvious brush stroke that gave his work an unfinished quality and was not afraid to leave the trail of his working patterns on his paintings. In The Large Bathers Cézanne used thick layers of paint on his brush to create a haze of blue and green colors.

The Large Bathers Critical Reception
The general reaction to Paul Cézanne's Bathers series was exceptional but it was The Large Bathers that stood out to many people as the key work in the collection. The Large Bathers was praised for its wide spaces, well-formed figures (particularly those on the right hand side) and use of color. The swirling blue and white sky that stretched down to the lagoon was admired for its commanding use of space.

Paul Cézanne had spent his life studying the nude and exploring the relationships between people. The Large Bathers was the culminating piece of his life's work and the critical reception of it is often bound up in this fact. The Large Bathers is admired by critics the world over for the serene quality of the painting and the contrasts between the bathers and the man swimming in the lake.

After death:
The Large Bathers was first owned by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1907, who bought it from Paul Cézanne's son (of the same name) after the artist's death. Vollard owned many of Cézanne's works and was for a long time his biggest art dealer. Vollard could see that The Large Bathers was going to be a timeless piece and considered it one of the defining pieces in his collection of Cézanne's work.

By the 1920s Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers was being lent to galleries all over the world for a grateful audience to admire. When the artist and sculptor Henry Moore saw the painting in 1922 he was stunned by its composition and said, "If you asked me to name the ten most intense moments of visual emotion in my life, that would be one of them."

The Large Bathers was bought by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for $110,000 and it is the one of the most famous pieces of art work that Paul Cézanne produced and there are many art prints and posters available.

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This is the largest, the last, and in many ways, the most ambitious work from Cézanne’s lifelong exploration of the time-honored theme of nudes in a landscape. It is also, perhaps, in its unfinished state, the purest and most serene witness to the man whom Paul Gauguin described as spending “entire days on mountaintops reading Virgil,” dreaming of wooded glades populated with beautiful figures who, if not exactly participants in a narrative as such, are full of animation and interaction. Perhaps it is its grand nobility—its authority as something beyond time, “like art in the museums,” as Cézanne said—that made it so attractive to many artists.

Near the end of his life Paul Cézanne painted three large canvases of female nudes disporting in a landscape. They derive in part from pastoral images of female bathers, such as the goddess Diana and her maidens, long favored in French art. These works seem to have been, for Cézanne, the culmination of a lifetime of exploration on the nude, his final testament within the grand tradition of French narrative painting on the nature of the human condition. They differ greatly from one another, these three paintings (the others are in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania, and the National Gallery, London). The Philadelphia version, perhaps because of its unfinished state, is both the most exalted and the most serene. The women command a great stage, very much like goddesses in some grand opera production, with the arched trees acting as the proscenium. They are completely at ease, and for all the motion and activity there is a profound sense of eternal calm and resolution, as well as a quality of monumentality achieved through the most lucid and unlabored means. Joseph J. Rishel, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 211.
PublicationTwentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
This is the last and largest work among scores of paintings of nude bathers, male and female, made by Cézanne over the course of his lifetime. The monumental scene conveys a grand sense of synthesis, combining figures and landscape in a stagelike setting of towering proportion. For both the formal structure of the landscape and the company of awkward bathers, Cézanne drew upon art historical precedents and his own imagination rather than natural observation. The painter exposed his artifice in technique as well as composition: the vibrant surface exults in rich, swirling layers of blues and greens, generously applied to make the air as palpable an element as earth and foliage.

Despite its grandeur, the painting has the feel of an unanswered question, a testament to the "anxiety" Picasso famously declared to be the source of his great interest in Cézanne. The artist left unresolved the startling contrast between the lushly painted landscape and the stiffly drawn, expressionless figures. A haunting stillness hovers over the scene, with its two mysterious figures in the background; an air of disquiet is signaled by a swimmer's interruption of the pond's calm surface. The painting's final state remains unfinished, revealed particularly in the seated figure at the lower right whose long arms betray their previous identity as two legs ready to depart the scene.

Painted at the very end of Cézanne s life, The Large Bathers revisits his own creative history and invokes his countless hours of studying and copying the masterpieces at the Louvre. The assembly of bathers calls to mind scenes of mythical goddesses more readily than modern French women, and the mood suggests a ritual rather than a picnic. Notwithstanding its deep roots in the past, the painting's pictorial daring is unparalleled, and today The Large Bathers appears as the opening scene to the artistic drama of the twentieth century. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 19.

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