Bathers, Cézanne, 1985

Cézanne painted bathers from the 1870s onwards, including numerous paintings with compositions of male and female bathers, singly or in groups. Late in life, he painted three large-scale female bather groups. In addition to the National Gallery's painting in London, they are now in the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I recently visited with this one in London, but am more familiar with the others.  Cézanne seems to have been at work on all three simultaneously at the time of his death.

In such works, Cézanne was reinterpreting a long tradition of paintings with nude figures in the landscape by artists such as Titian. While the subjects of their works were taken from Gree myths, Cézanne did not use direct literary sources. Instead, his central theme was the harmony of the figures with the landscape expressed through solid forms, strict architectonic structure, and the earth tones of the bodies. When exhibited in 1907, this painting became an inspiration for the nascent Cubist movement; he influenced both Picasso and Matisse.