Les Baigneurs, 1890

Cézanne came back to bathers again and again from the 1870s until he died, and this group of men by the water, painted around 1890, reaches back to his boyhood near Aix-en-Provence, when he swam in the river Arc with schoolfriends, the writer Émile Zola among them. There is nothing mythological here and no story to read. The bodies are blunt and unglamorous, fitted into the trees and sky so that a shoulder answers a branch and the whole thing locks together like masonry. That was his stated ambition, to fuse the figure and the landscape into one architecture. He later made a colour lithograph after it for the dealer Ambroise Vollard, which carried the composition to a wider public. It now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.