Five bathers

Five Bathers of 1877, now at the Musée Picasso in Paris, belongs to Cézanne's early bather period when he was still working out the compositional formats that would occupy him for the next three decades. Picasso himself owned this canvas, having purchased it from Vollard, and its presence in his collection speaks to the direct line of influence from Cézanne's bather project to Picasso's revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. The relatively small scale and the direct, searching quality of the paint handling mark this as a working canvas in which Cézanne was actively developing his approach.

The five figures are arranged in a loose grouping that Cézanne would refine through many subsequent bather compositions, their forms at this early stage retaining more conventional figure-painting characteristics than his later, more radically flattened bathers. The landscape setting is handled with the Impressionist freshness of his 1870s work, before the constructive method fully asserted itself.