This hitherto unpublished picture is one of only a very few studies preparatory to one of the greatest pictures in modern art, Les Grandes Baigneuses in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Venturi 719). The Philadelphia picture, albeit unfinished at Cézanne's death in 1906, is the summation of nearly 200 bather pictures executed during his life. John Rewald has written, 'Cézanne's lifelong preoccupation with compositions of nudes in the open air went through various phases. In the seventies, he began to represent groups of more or less isolated male bathers only loosely linked to each other; in the eighties, he concentrated frequently on a few female nudes closely assembled, often in pyramidal arrangements; from the nineties on he devoted himself to large and intricate compositions of numerous figures. Yet he also executed paintings quite different from these general types, either of single nudes or small canvases with half a dozen male bathers near and in the water. Occasionally he did more sketchy pictures which, while related to his more ambitious projects, retain something of the instant inspiration and verve absent from the huge compositions that represent his ultimate effort to place nude figures in a natural setting.' Of a similar sketch Rewald goes on to say, 'in this spontaneous work where his brush seems to have roamed over the canvas with utmost freedom, Cézanne did achieve an - admittedly causal - "knitting together of form and colour", while recouping some of the dynamic vision of his early romantic years.' (Cézanne, The Late Work, New York, 1977, p. 398). Theodore Reff similarly contrasts the exhilarating quality of these sketches with the more static attributes of the large versions, 'Painted with a boldness and exuberance not found in the larger versions and with a coloristic intensity that makes the warm flesh tones flash out against the deep greens and blues of the landscape, they express a radiant, lyrical vision of humanity in harmony with nature that is lacking in the large, laboriously revised compositions' (ibid, p. 40).

There were three large Grandes Baigneuses compositions of Cézanne's final years (Venturi 720 in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA; Venturi 721, National Gallery, London; and Venturi 719 in Philadelphia). It is generally thought that the Barnes and London versions were begun in the 1890s and were still being worked on when the Philadelphia picture was begun circa 1900. The Barnes picture was probably the first in date of the three, perhaps begun circa 1895 and represents eight upright figures sitting, standing or leaning. The London version shows ten figures in varied postures placed across the surface like a frieze. The right section of the composition already has the lying nude, the two striding figures behind and the seated figure of the present composition and the tree behind them angles up to the right. In the Philadelphia version there are now fourteen nudes, still split into two linked groups, against a broadly pyramidal backdrop. The arrangement of the figures has changed at the right so that the five nudes of the present study are there, although with the addition of two subsidiary figures to give further volume to the group. The tree behind angles to the left, instead of to the right.

The present composition can thus be seen as an intermediary stage in the refinement and development of the Bathers composition from the Barnes version towards the Philadelphia picture which was being worked on in the last few years of Cézanne's life after 1900. John Rewald has suggested a date of 1902-1906 for the present study. Venturi records two other related oil studies (V. 723, 11 x 14 1/8in. private collection; and V. 722, 20¼ x 24¼in. Art Institute of Chicago) which are closely related to the present study in Cézanne's development of the subject towards its final resolution in the Philadelphia painting. Venturi 723, more broadly treated and slightly unresolved, shows to the right of the composition the same group of five nudes. In it Cézanne appears to be wrestling with a different position for the seated nude on the right. Venturi 722 similarly has the same group of five with a further solution for the kneeling nude, but also with two further figures added to the right. In both Venturi 723 and 722 the tree at the right is also angled to the right as in the present study.

While working on these variations Cézanne at no time involved further studies from life, preferring to rely on his repertoire of studies and pictures from earlier periods. When François Jourdain visited Cézanne with Charles Camoin in 1904 Cézanne indicated that, "he had long stopped asking his models to remove their clothes'. "The painting...is in here, he added, beating his brow." (G. Boehm, "A Paradise created by Painting" in Paul Cézanne The Bathers, Basle, 1989, p. 18). Cézanne's work had taken on a conceptual quality as he worked towards resolutions of bather subjects which were only in the loosest sense based on reality. "Cézanne's bathers - sitting, standing or lying - exist solely for the sake of their being together, for the compositional relationships between them. All personal or temporal features about them, such as their faces, are absorbed into a superior entity. Their gestures reveal nothing about them; they have been transcended into something universal, distant, impersonal, almost faceless and they stand for the idea and the unity of the picture in which they feature." (K. Badt, The Art of Cézanne, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965, p. 155).

To be included in the forthcoming Cézanne oil paintings catalogue raisonné being prepared by John Rewald