Paul Czanne (1839-1906)

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.