The Bathers

The Bathers at the Indianapolis Museum of Art is among the more explicitly sensual of Pater's bathing compositions, presenting a group of women in and around water in a park setting that maintains the fig-leaf of Rococo decorum while maximising the appeal of unclothed female figures. The bathing subject had an ancient authority through mythological precedents — Diana and her nymphs, Venus rising from the sea — and Pater and his contemporaries were careful to invoke this lineage even in compositions without explicit mythological labels. The Indianapolis holding allows comparison with other French Rococo works in American collections that testify to the sustained demand for these subjects in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The composition organises the bathers in a shallow arc across the middle ground, with figures at varying stages of undress disposed left and right to create visual rhythm. Pater rendered the play of light on wet and dry skin with careful differentiation of highlight temperatures, using cooler whites for damp flesh and warmer cream tones for dry bodies.