Bathing Women

In July 1893 Pissarro wrote that he wanted to paint women bathing, and admitted that he was short of money and had no idea how he would find a model. He was living in Éragny, a village northwest of Paris where women rarely bared even their arms or ankles. Somehow he found one or two. A fair-haired model with her hair tied in a knot, seen from behind, turns up again and again over the next few years. She is in a coloured-chalk drawing now in Cambridge, in an 1895 painting of a nude standing in a room, and here, as the woman on the right, holding a white chemise at the edge of the stream. Pissarro dated this canvas 1896, and he went on making lithographs of bathers into 1897.