The Bathers

Nude female bathers are arranged beneath arching trees that lean inward to echo their poses, the whole scene built into a grand pyramidal architecture of figures and landscape in cool blues and greens. Cezanne worked on these monumental Bathers for years at the end of his life, abstracting the bodies into structural forms harmonized with nature. Now in Philadelphia, the Large Bathers is his crowning achievement - the human figure and the landscape fused into a single ordered design, a work that pointed directly toward Cubism and the whole of modern painting.