Cinq baigneuses (Five Bathers)

Through the 1880s Cézanne had pulled away from Paris and the Impressionist friends he had once shown beside, and settled back in his native Aix-en-Provence, working slowly and mostly out of public sight. Bathers in a landscape became a subject he returned to for the rest of his life, and this square canvas is one of the smaller reckonings with it. He built the five figures almost like masonry, squared off and fitted under the triangle of trees. He did not paint them from life. A respectable man in provincial Aix did not bring nude models into his studio, so he worked from old drawings, from memory, and from studies he had copied in the Louvre. The bodies and the blue air are laid down in the same patient blocks of paint.