Bathers

Bathers in a landscape were the subject Cezanne worked at longest, roughly 200 times over 30 years, in oil, watercolour and drawing. This one is tiny, about 20 centimetres each way. By the 1880s he had stopped showing with the Impressionists and spent most of his time in Provence, at Aix and at L'Estaque on the coast. Working there meant working without models. He did not hire people to pose undressed out of doors, and the figures in these pictures come instead from drawings he had made years earlier after casts and old master paintings, and from memory, which is why the same handful of poses keeps reappearing across the group. The canvas ended up a long way from Provence. It belongs to the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, which opened in 1930 as the first museum in Japan built around a collection of Western painting.