Scène d'été

Bazille laid this out in 1869 along the river Lez near his family's home outside Montpellier, drawing the young men first in his Paris studio and then setting them into the southern light. Eight of them lounge and swim in bathing trunks. He had first thought of painting them nude, then dressed them. The Salon accepted it in 1870, a real success for a painter still in his twenties. That same year the war with Prussia broke out, Bazille enlisted, and in November he was killed in action at 28. His friends Monet and Renoir, who had shared his studio and his money when they had none, went on to build Impressionism. This sunlit riverbank is one of the last things he finished.