Three Bathers
Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906) · 1879 to 1882
Three nude women occupy a small clearing framed by two leaning trees. One stands at the left with her back turned, one crouches in the centre, and one sits at the right, and their bodies, the tree trunks and the foliage lock together into a single arched shape. There is no story and no mythological excuse; Cézanne simply wanted figures in a landscape, a subject he pursued in more than two hundred paintings, watercolours and drawings from the 1870s until his death in 1906. The small canvas is one of the most concentrated statements of that lifelong project.
The technique is what makes the painting so alive. Cézanne builds everything from short, parallel strokes of colour laid in one direction, a method he developed in the years around 1880. The same diagonal hatching describes flesh, grass, bark and leaves, so that the figures seem to be made of the same substance as the landscape. Look at how the blues of the sky and water reappear in the shadows of the bodies, and how the outlines are drawn and redrawn in dark paint. Nothing is finished in the academic sense, yet the composition is as firmly built as an arch.
The painting belonged to Henri Matisse, who bought it from the dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1899 when he could barely afford it, and kept it for thirty seven years. He said it sustained him at critical moments in his career and taught him about structure and colour. In 1936 Matisse and his wife Amélie gave it to the City of Paris, with a letter asking the museum to hang it where it could be of use to other painters. That letter is the reason a Cézanne of this importance is in the Petit Palais.
Did You Know? Matisse wrote that in the thirty seven years he owned this painting he came to know it fairly well, though not entirely, and hoped it would serve other artists as it had served him.
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