Badende

In 1899 Cezanne was 60 and selling the Jas de Bouffan, the family house outside Aix, two years after his mother died. That same year the dealer Ambroise Vollard bought up what was left in his Paris studio, and small canvases like this one started reaching painters a generation younger. It is tiny, about 22 by 33 centimetres, a handful of male bathers among trees by water, a subject he had been rearranging since the 1870s without ever setting models outdoors to pose. This one belonged to Maurice Denis, who in 1900 painted a group of fellow admirers standing around a Cezanne still life in Vollard's shop. It stayed with Denis and then his daughter until 1949, when the French national museums bought it.