Las grandes bañistas

Cézanne spent the last ten years of his life mostly alone near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, out of the Paris art world, working and reworking a handful of large pictures of bathers beside a river. This is one of three, begun around 1894 and still with him in 1905, the year before he died. He was not painting particular people. The figures are built from the same blocks of blue and ochre as the trees behind them, their bodies bent to echo the arch of the branches overhead, so that group and landscape settle into one shape. Younger painters were already making the trip south to watch him work. In places he simply left the canvas bare, the picture never quite declared finished.