Bathers

Cézanne painted bathers from his 20s until the end of his life, and this canvas of about 1890 is one of the smaller, quieter ones. He did not use models for them. By this stage he was assembling the figures out of his own old life drawings and out of poses copied from sculpture and from Rubens in the Louvre, which is why the same handful of bodies keeps reappearing across the series, set among the same trees and sky. What happened to the picture afterwards is the unusual part. It belonged to Otto Krebs, a German engine manufacturer who kept his French paintings at his estate at Holzdorf in Thuringia and showed them to almost nobody. In 1945 the collection was taken to the Soviet Union, and the painting sat in closed storage at the Hermitage until 1995, when the museum put it on public display in an exhibition of works that had been written off as lost.