Les Baigneurs 1890

Painted c.1890 and held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, this Baigneurs canvas belongs to the sustained middle phase of Cézanne's bather theme. By 1890 the bathing male figure had become a recurrent formal subject — a vehicle for investigating the human body within natural setting without the constraints of academic life drawing or portraiture. Cézanne worked from memory, old master prints, and earlier sketches to build these synthetic figures, which are emphatically not observed nudes but constructed ones. The Jeu de Paume collection, now subsumed into the Musée d'Orsay holdings, represented the heart of French national Post-Impressionist collecting.

The male figures are rendered with angular, abbreviated treatment of muscles and posture, their forms built through planes of blue, ochre, and flesh pink rather than anatomical modelling. The foliage canopy is applied in short, curved strokes of varied green, creating a rhythmic pattern that rhymes with the figures below. The paint surface has the spare, structural quality of Cézanne's mature method.