Two Bathers

Gauguin worked this up in Paris over the winter of 1886 and 1887, from studies made the previous summer in Brittany, where he had gone partly because living there was cheap and he was almost out of money. It is an ambitious canvas for a man in that position, 130 centimetres across, and the ambition shows in the company it keeps. The calm, frieze-like nudes owe something to Puvis de Chavannes, whose murals were everywhere in French public buildings at the time, and the bending pose owes something to Degas. In March 1888 the critic Félix Fénéon gave the pair a long and admiring description in print. By then Gauguin had sailed to Martinique and come back ill, and some scholars think he returned to this canvas afterwards, though that remains a guess.