Two Bathers

Two Bathers (1887) at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina belongs to the small group of bather compositions Gauguin made in the mid-1880s under the dual influence of Cézanne's bather series and the Impressionist bathing subjects of Renoir and Degas. By 1887 he had been studying Cézanne's work directly — he owned a version of Cézanne's Bathers and would later take it to Tahiti — and the two-figure bather composition reflected this engagement while pursuing his own more decorative approach to the subject. Argentina's National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, which holds major European and South American works from across several centuries, acquired this early Gauguin bather as part of the South American collecting of European modernism that accelerated in the early twentieth century as Buenos Aires grew into one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

The two figures are set in a shallow, screen-like landscape with minimal recession. Gauguin's characteristic firm outlines define each form against the ground, and the flesh tones are built from warm ochres modulated with pink and cool shadow passages. The background vegetation is handled as a flat decorative field.