O Banhista

By the mid-1880s Cezanne had pulled back from Paris and the Impressionists to work mostly alone in the south of France, after something firmer and more built than fleeting light. Bathers were a lifelong subject for him, yet he was awkward with live models and shy of them. So for this standing youth he worked instead from a photograph of a man posed in a studio, then set the figure into a landscape that never existed, all blues and greens laid down in patient blocks. The boy stands with his hands on his hips and his eyes cast down, heavy and a little out of proportion, nothing like a classical hero. Cezanne kept returning to bathers until the very end of his life.