Trois Baigneuses

Cezanne showed his work at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the same moment he began a subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life: groups of bathers set out in the open. This is one of the early, small ones, hardly larger than a sheet of paper. Three women are built from short blocky strokes and pressed close against the trees behind them. He was after something he never fully resolved, a merging of the human figure into the landscape around it. He worked these scenes up from memory and drawings rather than from models posed outdoors. The paint is laid on in patches so solid the three figures seem carved from the same air as the trees.