Garçons se baignant

In 1900 there was barely such a thing as Latvian painting yet. The country was part of the Russian empire, and the few ambitious young painters from the Baltic, Valters among them, had trained at the imperial academy in St Petersburg. He came home full of the new French light. Three boys stand and crouch at the water's edge in warm sun, painted in quick bright strokes that catch the glare coming off wet skin and sand. There is no story here and no message, just heat and water and idle summer time. It became his best-known work from his Latvian years, before he left for Germany, and it hangs today in Riga as one of the first widely admired pictures of a national school of art that hardly existed when he made it.