Les Baigneuses (Women Bathing)

Les Baigneuses (Women Bathing), attributed to Pater and dated around 1717, represents the genre of outdoor female bathing that became increasingly popular in French Rococo painting after Watteau established the mode. Women bathing in natural or park settings occupied an ambiguous space between the pastoral ideal and the erotic, and Rococo painters exploited this ambiguity while maintaining a veneer of classical decorum through the park setting. A date of 1717 would make this an extremely early work, possibly influenced by Watteau's own bathing scenes, and the Hermitage's holding connects it to the Russian imperial collection's strong representation of French Rococo. The bathing women in such compositions were typically depicted as oblivious to any male gaze, maintaining the fiction of unobserved nature rather than erotic display.

Pater handled the flesh tones of the bathers with delicate, warm impasto highlights against cooler modelled shadows, a technique that gives the figures a soft luminosity consistent with the Rococo ideal of feminine beauty. The water, foliage, and sky are more loosely treated than the figures, creating a textural contrast that keeps the eye on the human subjects.