Baigneurs (Bathers)

For more than 20 years this canvas lived in Switzerland on loan. It had belonged to Cézanne's dealer Ambroise Vollard and then to Julius Schmits, a collector in Wuppertal in western Germany, who lent it to the Kunstmuseum in Basel in 1932. It stayed there through the Nazi years and the war, until 1953. From Basel it went to New York, where the Museum of Modern Art showed it in 1955 and again in 1977, in an exhibition of Cézanne's late work. The Musée d'Orsay dates it between 1900 and 1904. Five nudes stand, sit and crouch among trees under a blue sky, two of them with an arm raised. Its last private owner was the physicist Philippe Meyer, who gave it to the French state in 2000 but kept it at home until 2007, the year he died.