水浴する人々

In November 1895 a young dealer called Ambroise Vollard hung about 150 paintings by Cezanne in his small shop in Paris. It was the first exhibition anyone had given him, and he was 56. Most visitors had never seen his work, because he had stopped sending to the Salon and kept to the south. This small canvas of bathers comes from those years. Cezanne returned to the subject for some 30 years and almost never worked from a living model for it. He used drawings he had made as a young man and figures he had copied from the old masters in the Louvre, which is why the same twisted poses reappear from picture to picture. Sidney and Jenny Brown of Baden, who started buying French painting in 1908 for their new villa in Switzerland, took this one home to it.