Paul Czanne (1839-1906)

Baigneur aux bras carts

Details

Paul Czanne (1839-1906)
Czanne, P.
Baigneur aux bras carts
oil on canvas
9 x 6 in. (23.5 x 15.9 cm.)
Painted circa 1876

Provenance

Ambroise Vollard, Paris.
Mrs. Edouard Jonas, Paris (acquired from the estate of the above). Sidney Schoenberg, St. Louis.
E.V. Thaw, New York.
James Lord, Paris.

Literature

L. Venturi, Czanne, son art--son oeuvre, Paris, 1936, vol. I, p. 122, no. 259 (dated 1875-1877); vol. II, pl. 69 (illustrated).
T. Reff, "Czanne's Bather with Outstretched Arms," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, March 1962, p. 177.
J. Rewald, The Paintings of Paul Czanne, A Catalogue Raisonn, New York, 1996, vol. I, p. 175, no. 255; vol. II, pl. 82 (illustrated).

Exhibited

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Paintings from the Vollard Collection, 1950-1951, no. 8.

Lot Essay

The present painting is one of a series of four small oil paintings executed by Czanne which shows the artist's preoccupation with the compositional problems of a single standing figure with outstretched arms (Rewald, nos. 252, 253, 369). In the final version (Rewald, no. 370) the artist "achieves the perfectly balanced posture for which he was searching, as well as a harmonious relationship between figure and landscape" (J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 244).

The theme of the bather occupied Czanne for almost three decades, from the 1870s until his death in 1906.

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