The Bathers

In 1853, Gustave Courbet showed a large canvas of a heavy, half-dressed country woman wading out of a pond, and it scandalized the Paris Salon. Delacroix saw it and disliked it, noting in his journal how pointless he found the coarseness of the forms. A year later a patron asked him for his own bathers in a wooded glade, spelling out how many figures there should be and insisting they stay decently draped. This was rare ground for Delacroix, who almost never painted women bathing. He worked it up at his country house outside Paris, near the forest of Sénart. The warm flesh here owes something to the French Rococo he admired as a young man, while the two calm, classical women in front recall the Venetian masters he had copied for decades. He was nearing 60 when he made it, with fewer than ten years left to live.