Three Bathers

Painted in 1907 and held in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 'Three Bathers' connects directly to Matisse's lifelong engagement with Cézanne's Bathers series, which he regarded as among the most significant paintings of the nineteenth century. He had purchased Cézanne's own 'Three Bathers' in 1899 and kept it through the most difficult years of his career as an object of study and inspiration. Matisse's version transforms the subject through his own colour language, converting Cézanne's structural colour planes into a more vigorously Fauvist arrangement of figure and setting. The subject of bathers allowed him to combine the figure study, the landscape, and the nude in a single genre with a distinguished precedent — from Courbet through Cézanne to his own contemporaries Derain and Picasso, who were simultaneously exploring the same theme.

The three figures are arranged across the canvas in a rhythm that recalls Cézanne's compositional organisation while reinterpreting it through Matisse's bolder colour range. The landscape setting is handled as a series of colour zones rather than a described space.