Baigneuses (Bathers)

Baigneuses (Bathers) of 1874, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a foundational work in the bather series Cézanne would pursue for three decades. He had been attempting the subject since the late 1860s, when his early figure paintings were heavily indebted to Delacroix and the Romantic tradition, but by 1874 the Impressionist lessons of the Auvers period were being folded into a new approach that was neither conventionally academic nor straightforwardly Impressionist. The Metropolitan holds this canvas as part of a Cézanne collection that spans his career, allowing visitors to trace the development from these tentative early bathers to the monumental late compositions. In 1874, Cézanne also contributed to the first Impressionist exhibition — the show organized by Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro that gave the movement its name — though his work was harshly received by critics. The bathers belonged to a private ambition that the Impressionist public context could not accommodate; he worked on them in the privacy of his studio and the wooded landscapes around Aix, where he painted from imagination and memory rather than from posed models.

The 1874 bathers are rendered with a combination of Impressionist looseness and a groping structural ambition that distinguishes them from the contemporary work of Monet or Renoir. The figures' forms are less integrated with the landscape than in Cézanne's later work, occupying the pictorial space with a slightly uneasy relationship to their natural setting that he would resolve through a decade of intensive experiment.