Cezanne's Bathers: Autobiographical Origins of Form and Content

Three monumental paintings from the last years of Cezanne's life--the great bather compositions in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania, in London, and in Philadelphia--may be regarded as the climax of the master's life-long preoccupation with this subject. Bathing figures are found in nearly two hundred of Cezanne's oil paintings, watercolors, lithographs and drawings. A continual resource for these pictures is anticipated and provided by the motifs, models and landscapes found in the artist's earlier and coeval figure paintings. A systematic study of these images presents a picture of Cezanne's personality which closely parallels his artistic development thereby constituting a response to iconographical as well as to formal considerations. His first drawing of bathers was on a letter sent to Emile Zola in 1859; the last images may have been painted only a few days before his death in 1906. The succession of figures in the bathers may be a survival of pagan imagery, as Cezanne's classical heritage suggests, but they are also fused with romantic and realistic impressions from his own writings and those of his contemporaries. They reflect his choice of models from sculpture and painting found in the Louvre and in nineteenth-century artistic publications. More importantly, their assemblage reveals an intimate self-portrait of the artist, giving oblique references to his friendship with Zola and persistent recourse to his relationship with women. The overt themes from the early works--temptation and death, picnics, idolized women--become sublimated when they enter the bather compositions. It is there that the compositions and their figural arrangements allude to two traditional properties of water: spiritual cleansing (in Baptism) and bodily rejuvenation (in the Fountain of Youth). The sensuality and violence of the early years is progressively submerged in metaphorical ablutions. To dissect with candor not only the masterpieces of a monumental figure in the history of art, but his inner life as well, is an awsome undertaking. It is hoped that the results of this investigation are presented here with deference to Cezanne's artistic genius and without affront to his character.