Bathers

Cezanne worked at bathers for the last 30 years of his life and almost never from a living model. Back in Aix in the 1890s he assembled the figures from drawings he had made in Paris in his twenties, from prints, and from sculpture he had copied in the Louvre, which is why the same bodies turn up from canvas to canvas across the group. This one is small, 29 by 45 centimetres, and it is dated only approximately, somewhere around the middle of that decade. The painting belongs to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and has hung in Aix on deposit since 1984, apart from two years when the Granet was being rebuilt.