Paul Cezanne - The Large Bathers Apron

The Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), painted in Aix-en-Provence between 1900 and 1906 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. Monumental female bathers gather beneath arching trees whose trunks frame the composition and echo the triangular arrangement of the figures. Cézanne builds bodies and landscape from broad planes of blue, green, ochre and warm flesh tones, making the figures feel embedded in the surrounding nature. This was the largest, the last and one of the most ambitious works in Cézanne’s lifelong exploration of bathers, and he was still working on it when he died in 1906. The painting brings together two lifelong concerns, the human figure and the Provençal landscape, on an unusually ambitious scale. Its unfinished state remained visible when it was shown in Cézanne’s major posthumous retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne, an exhibition that had a profound impact on younger artists in Paris.