Trois Baigneuses

Painted c.1874 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, Trois Baigneuses belongs to the earliest phase of Cézanne's decades-long bather theme. The work was executed around the time of the first Impressionist exhibition and shows the theme in its initial, relatively tentative form — the figures are set in landscape but lack the monumental, architectonic quality of his later bather series. The Orsay canvas has a famous provenance: it was owned by Henri Matisse, who acquired it from Ambroise Vollard in 1899 and kept it for nearly four decades, citing it as the most important influence on his own development as an artist.

Three female figures occupy a wooded landscape, their forms tentatively but distinctively abstracted from conventional anatomical norms. The paint surface is worked with varied brushwork — more thickly applied in the foliage, leaner in the flesh tones. The palette is cool and relatively muted, dominated by greens, blues, and pale flesh tones. The compositional triangulation that would dominate the late bathers is here in embryonic form.