Paul Cezanne - Four Bathers Notebook

Four Women Bathers (Quatre baigneuses), painted between 1877 and 1878 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. Four female bathers are set within a wooded landscape, where their bodies are integrated with the surrounding trunks, foliage and ground. Cézanne avoids polished academic modelling and instead constructs the figures with emphatic outlines and broad areas of colour. The painting belongs to a group of five related bather compositions in which four or five women are arranged in pyramidal structures. Here, inward-leaning trees echo the tilted poses of the bathers, while parallel constructive brushstrokes organise the surface into a dense network of repeated forms and rhythms.