Bather in the Woods

In July 1893 Pissarro wrote that he wanted to paint female bathers, then admitted he was short of money and had no idea where he would find a model. He lived in Éragny, a village north-west of Paris where women rarely bared even their arms or ankles, let alone posed nude. He did find one or two, and this canvas sits in the middle of a run of bathers he kept returning to until 1896. The same pose turns up in two studies of a clothed model he painted that year. The picture sold fast. In October 1895 the dealer Alphonse Portier sold it for 1,800 francs to Hayashi Tadamasa, the Japanese art dealer then working in Paris, and Pissarro grumbled to his son Georges that it had gone for half what he had hoped.