Description
The Large Bathers – the canvas Cézanne painted for seven years
The Large Bathers from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is the largest canvas Paul Cézanne ever painted and the last great work of his life. Above a group of female nudes the trees close into a high Gothic arch, and behind them a blue river and a distant town open out. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this monumental scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas with the blue that served Cézanne as the material of space.
Seven years of work and an unfinished end
Cézanne worked on this canvas for about seven years, from around 1900 until his death in 1906, and never declared it finished. In several places the bare ground of the canvas shows through the paint – the painter did not fill those gaps in. That is exactly what made the work so influential: the next generation saw in it a permission for a painting not to be a smoothly finished surface. Pablo Picasso knew The Large Bathers and treated them as a starting point for his own work; the connection with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 is regularly cited by art history, though it is a reading by later writers rather than a documented statement by Picasso.
Three large bather canvases, not one
Cézanne carried the large bathers subject through in three large versions, which hang today in three collections: the Philadelphia Museum of Art (this one, the largest), the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the National Gallery in London. All three show a group of bathers beside water, but the arrangement of the figures and the shape of the arch of trees differ in each. The version you see here is the only one in which the trunks lean in from both sides into an almost symmetrical tent above the scene.
What you see on the canvas
The figures are not portraits and are not painted from a live model – in his late years Cézanne drew from memory, from his own early sketches and from the sculptures in the Louvre. The bodies are simplified into planes and outlined shapes that match the rhythm of the trees; some of the bathers have no drawn faces. On the far side of the water stand a small figure and the tower of a settlement. The original is painted in oil on canvas and measures 210.5 × 250.8 cm; it is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A monumental subject for a large wall
Cézanne’s largest composition we paint by hand, plane by plane; a print would flatten it into uniformity. Besides the ten sizes we paint it to your measurements – with a subject this wide that is often the best choice. It works best above a sofa or in a room with a high ceiling. We show you the frame with a realistic 3D preview. Among our reproductions on canvas you will find Cézanne’s other compositions with nudes: The Large Bathers (Barnes), The Bather and The Abduction.
- Subject: The Large Bathers, Paul Cézanne, 1900–1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art
- 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: Cézanne’s largest canvas, painted over seven years and left unfinished
