Femmes fellah au bain

Femmes fellah au bain (Fellah Women Bathing) by Émile Bernard, dated around 1900 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts of Reims, belongs to the extended period Bernard spent in Cairo and Egypt beginning in 1893. Bernard — who had been a crucial figure in the genesis of Post-Impressionism alongside Gauguin and Van Gogh in the late 1880s — retreated to Egypt partly out of disillusionment with the Parisian avant-garde. In Cairo he turned to subjects from Egyptian daily life, and the bathing women here reflect both his continued interest in the female figure and the Orientalist tradition that saw the harem and the bath as sites of exotic feminine privacy.

Bernard employs a more traditionally academic modelling than the bold contours of his earlier cloisonnist work, the Egyptian period representing a retreat from synthetism toward classical form. The palette is warm and Mediterranean, and the figures are rendered with careful attention to the fall of light on wet skin.