Bathers

In March 1906 the dealer Ambroise Vollard sent this canvas to Giverny, where Claude Monet bought it. Monet kept a private collection that almost nobody outside the house saw, and Cézanne was the painter he pursued hardest in it, buying one picture after another from Vollard. Cézanne died that October, seven months later.

The bathers are men on a riverbank, a subject Cézanne worked at from around 1890 onward, put together from drawings and from memory rather than from models posed outdoors. What he was remembering was swimming as a boy in the Arc, the river below his home town of Aix in Provence.

After Monet's death the picture stayed at Giverny with his son Michel, then went on to London and New York, and the Saint Louis Art Museum bought it in 1955.