Bather at the Seashore (Baigneuse au bord de la mer)

This 1875 Barnes Foundation canvas of a bather at the seashore belongs to the early development of Cézanne's bather theme, which would culminate in the monumental Large Bathers of his final years. The single female figure at the water's edge is painted with the awkwardness characteristic of his early figure work — he had difficulty with the live model and struggled to integrate figures convincingly into landscape settings. Yet this struggle itself produced the distinctive, slightly inhuman quality of his bathers: figures that exist more as formal elements than psychological presences. Albert Barnes assembled a remarkable concentration of Cézanne's figure works.

The figure's slightly rigid, constructed quality reflects Cézanne's early difficulty synthesizing figure and landscape. The sea and sky are rendered in horizontal strokes of blues and greens, while the figure is built from more vertical marks. The overall color is warm and Mediterranean in character, the figure lit from above by strong sunlight.