Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)

The women lean, sit and turn together beneath a blue sky. Their bodies form a dense group, while the trees on either side continue the strong diagonals. Although the title names bathers, this London painting shows no pool of water. Paul Cézanne, a French painter working mainly in Provence, returned to the subject of people bathing throughout his life. This canvas belongs to a group of three large late paintings developed during the 1890s and early 1900s. The other two are in separate collections in Philadelphia. In this version, eleven women share the wooded space. Near the foreground is a small dark dog and a still life with fruit. Faces are simplified or turned away, making the arrangement of whole bodies more prominent than individual expressions. Look through the reproduction for related patches of blue and warm orange-brown. They recur across skin, ground and surrounding space. Cézanne uses those colours and repeated angles to bring people and landscape into one solid, closely connected composition.