Bathers in the Borromean Islands

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's 1872 painting of bathers on the Borromean Islands belongs to the classical nude subjects he explored throughout his career alongside his better-known landscapes. The Borromean Islands on Lake Maggiore — the famous Isole Borromee including Isola Bella with its baroque gardens — provided an Italian location of legendary beauty as a setting for figures bathing in a classical tradition. Corot's bathers are never erotic; they exist as natural presences within landscape, recalling seventeenth-century Northern European treatments of Diana and her nymphs rather than academic salon nudes. The Hiroshima Museum of Art's holding places this work in one of Japan's distinguished collections of French Impressionist and Realist painting.

Corot renders the figures in his characteristic soft, atmospheric manner — they are absorbed into the landscape rather than posed against it. The pale figures are given warmth through the reflected golden light of the Italian lake setting. The background trees and water are handled with the silvery feathery treatment of his mature style.