Women Bathing

Gauguin's 1885 painting of women bathing, now in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, belongs to his early Post-Impressionist period when he was still working through Pissarro's Impressionist influence while developing a more independent approach. Bathing women had been a central subject in French painting from Courbet through Renoir, and Gauguin's treatment shows him interrogating the tradition rather than simply following it. By 1889 this subject would become central to his Breton work and his Tahitian paintings, the bathing female figure representing both observed reality and idealized communion with nature. This 1885 version is an important early treatment.

The figures are placed in outdoor water in a composition that still reflects Impressionist observation of natural light on bodies. Gauguin's palette and brushwork are moving away from Pissarro's influence toward a denser, less shimmering approach. The figures' forms are beginning to simplify, and the landscape setting is treated with greater flatness than pure Impressionism would dictate.