by : Paul Cezanne / location : Museum of Modern Art: NY, USA / Year : c.1885 / Oil on canvas

Original size: 127.0 x 96.8 cms

This is one of the figures that comprised the groups of bathers in the paintings Cézanne did around 1875.

It is believed that he was dipping into his memory of days spent on the river as a boy with Emile Zola who picked up the same atmosphere in his novel L’Opera that led to the break-up of their friendship.

Cézanne was offended by the fact that he could be “recognized” as the protagonist. Paintings such as this also clearly recall the classical sculptures that Cézanne studied constantly.

The Bather is one of Cézanne's most evocative paintings of the figure, although the unmuscled torso and arms have no heroic pretensions, and the drawing, in traditional, nineteenth-century terms, is awkward and imprecise.

The bather's left, forward leg is placed firmly on the ground, but his right leg trails and carries no weight. The right side of his body is pulled higher than the left, the chin curves lopsidedly, and the right arm is elongated and oblique.

The landscape is as bare as a desert, but its green, violet, and rose coloration refuses that name. Its dreaming expanse matches the bather's pensiveness. Likewise, the shadows on the body, rather than shifting to black, share the colors of the air, land, and water; and the brushwork throughout is a network of hatch-marks and dapples, restless yet extraordinarily refined. The figure moves toward us but does not meet our gaze.

These disturbances can be characterized as modern: they indicate that while Cézanne had an acute respect for much of traditional art, he did not represent the male nude the way the classical and Renaissance artists had done.

He wanted to make an art that was "solid and durable like the art of the museums" but that also reflected a modern sensibility incorporating the new understanding of vision and light developed by the Impressionists. He wanted to make an art of his own time that rivaled the traditions of the past.