Trois Baigneuses

Trois Baigneuses (Three Bathers), painted in 1867 on paper and held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, belongs to the extended sequence of bathing figures that occupied Courbet from his famous 1853 Bathers (which caused a scandal at the Salon) through numerous subsequent versions. The bathing subject allowed Courbet to combine his two great passions — the female nude and natural landscape — in a setting that justified both without mythological pretense. Real women bathing in natural water was both a legitimate genre subject and an opportunity for frank physical observation. The paper support is unusual for this scale and subject, possibly indicating a more rapid, working nature to the piece. Three figures rather than a single bather created compositional options for the relationships between bodies: the engaged, the observed, the self-absorbed. These bathing compositions entered the bloodstream of French painting and influenced Cézanne, who made his own series of bathers in response.

Work on paper would have influenced the technique — lighter applications, possibly watercolor washes in addition to oil, with the paper's tooth providing a different surface for impasto than stretched canvas. The three figures require a spatial arrangement that gives each visual autonomy while organizing them into a coherent group.