Baigneur assis au bord de l'eau

From the mid-1870s Cezanne kept returning to a private, oddly stubborn subject, bare figures set out in a landscape by the sea or a river. This single seated bather comes near the start of that long series. The curious thing is how he made them. Cezanne was too shy to hire nude models, and admitted as much to Emile Bernard, a young painter who sought him out late in his life. Instead he worked from memory, from the drawings he had made as a student in Paris and from statues and old-master paintings he studied in the museums. So the pose here is composed rather than observed, the body given a blocky, almost carved solidity that lets it settle among the ground and rocks around it. He painted well over 30 of these bather pictures across his career, men and women both, always chasing the same fusion of figure and place.