Bathers

On 5 October 1909 the Moscow textile magnate Ivan Morozov bought this small canvas from Ambroise Vollard, Cézanne's Paris dealer. Cézanne had been dead for three years, and Morozov and his fellow Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin were both buying his work. The picture is barely bigger than a sheet of drawing paper, 26 by 40 centimetres, and it holds six men under a tree, some sitting on the bank, one standing with his back to us, one with an arm raised over his head, and a white cloth hanging in the middle of the group. In 1912 Sergei Makovsky, editor of the St Petersburg art magazine Apollon, wrote up Morozov's collection and listed it simply as a study of bathers. Its date has never been settled. A photograph in Vollard's archive is annotated 1885, the Cézanne catalogue raisonné places it in 1892 to 1894, and the Pushkin Museum, where it has been since 1948, gives 1890 to 1894.