Women Bathing

Women Bathing, dated 1910 and held by the Hermitage Museum, places Somov within the European tradition of bathing figure painting that extends from Boucher to Renoir, refracted through his own ironic nostalgia for the eighteenth century. By 1910 Somov had fully developed his signature vocabulary of coquettish women in Rococo-inflected settings, their world a knowing reconstruction of aristocratic pleasure culture viewed through a modernist lens of melancholy and artifice. The Hermitage's holding of this work places it among the finest Russian paintings in the national collection, recognising Somov's importance within the World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) group he had helped found with Diaghilev and Benois in 1898. Women bathing was a subject that allowed him to explore the human body while surrounding it with the decorative accessories — parasols, reflective water, sunlit gardens — of his beloved eighteenth-century imaginary. The 1910 canvas belongs to the peak period of his powers, before the disruptions of war and revolution transformed the conditions of artistic life in Russia.

The 1910 bathing canvas demonstrates Somov's mature fusion of academic figure drawing with Mir Iskusstva decorative refinement. Flesh tones are rendered with cool clarity against garden greens and blues, the composition balancing naturalistic figure observation with the slightly stylised quality of his best work. Surface finish is carefully controlled throughout.