Baigneuses (Bathers)

Baigneuses (Bathers) of 1874, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is among the earliest works in Cézanne's female bather series, painted at the precise moment he was intensively studying Impressionist technique while also beginning to develop his own systematic approach to form. The Metropolitan holds several key Cézanne works spanning his career, and this early bather canvas is significant for documenting the bather project at its most tentative and experimental stage, before the formal language he would apply to the subject was fully established.

The 1874 bathers are rendered with a combination of Impressionist looseness and a groping structural ambition that distinguishes them from the contemporary work of Monet or Renoir. The figures' forms are less integrated with the landscape than in Cézanne's later work, occupying the pictorial space with a slightly uneasy relationship to their natural setting that he would resolve through a decade of intensive experiment.