Bathers in front of a Tent

The tent in the title is really a length of cloth slung over a branch. That is how the stock book of Ambroise Vollard, Cézanne's dealer, described the picture: naked women beside a big tree, with linen hanging from its boughs like a tent. Cézanne's son later dated it to about 1880, and the catalogue of the painter's work now places it around 1883 to 1885. Then the canvas went north. A Swedish collector, Klas Fåhraeus, bought it in 1912 and lent it to an exhibition of French art at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1917, where it was listed simply as La Tente. It passed to Oslo, first to the Norwegian painter and dealer Walther Halvorsen, then to the shipowner Ragnar Moltzau. In 1959 Stuttgart paid ten million marks for 30 of Moltzau's pictures, helped by a lottery law the state of Baden-Württemberg had passed the year before, and this one came with them.