Women Bathing

Bathing figures in a landscape were a subject Cézanne circled for more than thirty years, and in the last decade of his life, around 1900, he gave them nearly everything he had. This is one of a small group of late canvases of women bathing that he worked at again and again. He was not painting models in a real place. He was fitting the bodies to the trees and the ground like parts of one structure, the arch of the branches answering the bend of the figures. The paint is thin in places, still searching, left as if it could be carried further. He kept returning to this theme in his largest pictures right up to his death in 1906.