Three Bathers

Cézanne painted these three bathers between about 1879 and 1882, three nudes locked into an arch of leaning trees, the bodies built from blocks of blue and green like the landscape around them. At the time few people wanted such a thing. Then in 1899 a young and nearly broke Henri Matisse walked into the dealer Vollard's shop and bought it, signing away 1,200 francs he could not really spare. He kept it for 37 years. When his own students needed to grasp how a picture could be held together by colour alone, this is the one he pointed to. In 1936 he finally gave it to the city of Paris, telling them it had sustained him morally through the hardest moments of his life as an artist.