Cézanne's Large Bathers tells no story, and that is the point. Nude women gather in a wooded clearing, built from patches of color the way he built a hillside. Cézanne drew them from older pictures, not from live models, and he wanted a scene with no event, one that could hang beside the old masters.
Cézanne worked on three huge versions in his last years, and all three were still in his studio when he died in 1906. They hang today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London and the Barnes Foundation, a second museum in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia canvas is the largest, about 2.1 meters tall and 2.5 meters wide.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Cézanne spent his life in front of apples, rocks and mountains, turning each of them into a few simple solids of color. In April 1904 he told a younger painter, Émile Bernard, to treat nature through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.
The Large Bathers are his biggest nudes, yet Cézanne told Bernard he was too shy to hire models for these pictures. A painter who preached nature painted them with no one posing.
Women drawn from paper
For the London picture, Cézanne worked from drawings he had made in his youth, from sketches after sculpture, and from photographs of professional models. The women were assembled from other pictures and then fitted into the trees. I think that is why they feel built rather than seen.
Nudes in a landscape were a lifelong subject for him, and he had been at it for decades by the time he stretched canvases this size. The Philadelphia canvas is the last of them, and in many ways the most ambitious.
In 1904 Bernard photographed him seated in front of the Barnes canvas, in his studio at Les Lauves, on a hill above Aix-en-Provence in southern France. The picture behind him is 2.19 meters wide. Its date is 1895 to 1906, so he kept working on it after the photograph.
The London canvas hides a change he made to the sky, one nobody could see for decades.
What You'll Discover
What he did to the London sky.
Why there are three versions.
What the women are doing.
Who treasured a smaller Cézanne bather.