Description
The Large Bathers (Barnes) – the largest of the three versions
This is one of the three great bather compositions with which Cézanne closed his work. A group of female nudes sits and reclines under dark trees beside water; a basket and a dog lie in the foreground. The canvas is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this monumental scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
Three Large Bathers, three different solutions
Cézanne carried the subject through in three large canvases: this one from the Barnes collection, a second in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a third in the National Gallery in London. All three show a group of bathers beside water, but the arrangement of the figures differs in each. This version is the most horizontal and the most closed – the trees form a dark roof rather than a bright arch.
Bodies that are not portraits
The figures are not painted from a model. In his late years Cézanne did not work with live models; he leaned on his own early drawings, on memory, and on the sculptures he drew in the Louvre. That is why the nudes have no individual faces – they are the shapes the composition demands.
What you see on the canvas
On the left a group of seated and standing figures, on the right a reclining nude closing the scene. Between them the view opens onto blue water and a bright sky. The original is painted in oil on canvas and by the collection’s record measures 219 × 132 cm; it was made in the last decade of the painter’s life.
Walls arranged as a teaching aid
Barnes did not arrange his paintings by painter or period. He composed them into densely filled wall groups in which a Cézanne canvas might hang beside an African sculpture, a medieval lock and a piece of American furniture – so that the visitor would see formal kinships instead of historical pigeonholes. The collection was conceived as a school rather than a museum, and for a long time was only open to the public in a limited way. When it moved to Philadelphia in 2012, these wall arrangements were carried over into the new building unchanged.
A large composition for a large wall
A composition with this many figures we paint by hand – each one is built from planes that print flattens into uniformity. It comes in ten sizes, and for genuinely large walls we paint to your measurements. Its width means it works best above a sofa or a bed. You see the frame in advance in a realistic 3D preview. Among our reproductions of famous paintings you will find Cézanne’s other compositions with nudes: The Large Bathers (Philadelphia), The Bather and Afternoon in Naples.
- Subject: The Large Bathers, Paul Cézanne, 1900–1905, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: one of three large bather compositions – each solves the same problem differently
