Bathers at Rest (Baigneurs au repos)

Bathers at Rest (Baigneurs au repos) of 1875, now at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, is one of the most important early works in Cézanne's bather series, showing him already working on the large-scale, ambiguously gendered bather subject that he would develop throughout his mature career. The Barnes Foundation holds an extraordinary concentration of Cézanne bather paintings, which Albert C. Barnes assembled with a collector's instinct for the most radical and resolved works of this subject. The 1875 date places this canvas in Cézanne's Impressionist period, before his constructive method fully crystallized.

The figures at rest are modeled with a combination of Impressionist facture and a nascent structural ambition that anticipates the constructive approach of his later work. The composition is more conventionally spatial than his mature bathers, with a recognizable foreground-middleground-background organization that would be progressively flattened in subsequent decades.