Baigneuse au bord de la mer

Around 1875 Cezanne began working on the subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life, single figures bathing at the edge of water. He almost never used a live model for them. Shy of the naked body and of models in general, he built these bathers out of memory, old drawings and imagination, which is part of why they stand so stiff and blocky in the landscape. This early one is small and plain next to the great walls of bathers he painted decades later, yet the idea is already here, the human figure treated as solid architecture set against sky and sea. It ended up in the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, whose founder Albert Barnes bought Cezannes by the dozen when few Americans wanted them.