The Bathers

The Bathers (c.1900) at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the intense final phase of Cézanne's bather project, when his handling had become more open and his formal ambitions more concentrated. By 1900 he was working on the three Large Bathers simultaneously while also producing smaller bather compositions like this one — working through the formal problems at different scales. The late bather canvases are increasingly difficult to read as figures in a naturalistic setting: flesh tones and landscape colors converge, figures blend into foliage, the conventional distinction between subject and ground breaks down. The Art Institute's bather canvas joins its other major late Cézanne holdings — the Bay of Marseilles, the House on a River, the Standing Bather — as part of one of the world's most significant institutional concentrations of his work. The temporal context is critical: 1900 is the year before Picasso would settle in Paris and begin the sustained study of Cézanne that would lead, through Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), to Cubism.

The late bathers are handled with a freedom of facture that pushes beyond the systematic constructive stroke of his middle period toward a more open, expressive paint application, with areas of unpainted canvas left as part of the composition. The figures' forms are barely distinguished from the landscape elements surrounding them, color and plane unifying human and natural worlds.