Study For After Swimming - Study Of A Nude

This 1909 preparatory study for 'After Swimming' demonstrates Van Rysselberghe's working process: before committing to a large exhibition canvas he made careful nude studies from life to establish pose, proportion, and the behaviour of light on the body. The study belongs to an extended engagement with the post-bathing figure — women caught in the intimate, transitional moment between immersion and drying — that runs through his work from the mid-1890s onwards. Such studies occupied a different conceptual register from finished paintings: freed from the demands of public presentation, they allowed more direct observation and a looser, more searching touch. Van Rysselberghe had trained rigorously in the academic tradition at the Ghent Academy and the Brussels Academy, and his figure studies show that discipline even as the surface technique embraces divisionist experimentation. The 'After Swimming' series belongs to the long European tradition of the female nude in a domestic or natural setting, updated here through Post-Impressionist colour theory.

Oil on canvas worked as a preparatory study rather than a finished exhibition piece, with visible pentimenti and areas where the drawing structure shows through the paint layer. Brushwork is freer than in completed canvases, with the pose and major light-shadow relationships established in direct strokes. Skin tones are rendered with the warm-cool divisionist contrasts characteristic of Van Rysselberghe.