Women Bathing

Women Bathing (c.1900) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen belongs to the late phase of Cézanne's sustained bather project, when the female figure in landscape had become his most ambitious pictorial investigation. The Danish national sculpture museum's collection of this Cézanne reflects Scandinavia's early and sustained engagement with French Post-Impressionism. By 1900 Cézanne was working simultaneously on the three monumental Large Bathers while also producing smaller bather compositions that served as working exercises in the same formal problems. The late bather canvases increasingly dissolve the boundary between figure and landscape: flesh tones and foliage colors converge, figures are barely distinguished from the trees behind them, and the conventional hierarchy of figure over ground is abandoned in favor of a flat chromatic unity. The Glyptotek context — surrounded by classical sculpture — provides an instructive contrast to Cézanne's anti-classical approach to the nude figure.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.