Baigneuses

In 1884, Camille Pissarro and his family moved from Pontoise to Eragny, settling in a house surrounded by a large garden through which the river Epte flowed. Here, Pissarro created a group of works that focused not solely on the landscape but also incorporated figures engaged in a range of pastoral activities like working in the garden or fields, picking fruit, tending to animals, and resting. In 1894–1896, the artist further developed on his prior work and painted a dozen canvases depicting female nudes seen both singly and in groups, possibly prompted in part by an extended period of bad weather in the area in 1894 that made landscape painting impossible. These works represent Pissarro’s only sustained exploration of the nude form in his entire career; the scarcity of such works in his oeuvre is anecdotally attributed to his wife’s disapproval of his working with the subject, but the artist’s lifelong financial troubles and the difficulty in finding models in the small, rural towns where he spent much of his career likely also played a role. The present painting, which depicts three young female bathers by a woodland stream, is part of this rare body of work.

Critic François Thibault-Sisson, speaking of Pissarro’s bathers, wrote, "I know of no contemporary artist capable of rendering the nude en plein air so masterfully and of swathing it in such subtly luminous caresses as M. Pissarro" (quoted in op. cit., 2005, p. 699). In Baigneuses, the three bathers’ fleshy bodies are softly illuminated by natural light, infusing the scene with an arcadian harmony as the women seem quietly lost in thought amidst a peaceful and secluded corner of nature. The work’s idealized, non-specific imagery strengthens its imaginative component and allows the viewer to devise their own narrative for the scene. Richard Thomson has written, "Pissarro, in determinedly taking up the bathing theme, was less representing observed daily life than following a stereotype for nineteenth-century landscape painters such as Millet, Daubigny, and Corot, adopting an existing iconography for such subjects" (Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape, and Rural Labor, London, 1990, p. 90).
Baigneuses also expresses a period of change in Pissarro’s painting that began in the early 1890s. Seeking to depart from the Divisionist method which he had adopted the decade before, Pissarro had been tirelessly experimenting to devise a distinct manner of painting that would enable him to incorporate certain Divisionist principles with a more naturalistic form of modelling. The present work reflects Pissarro’s explorations as the scene is rendered with Divisionist brushwork but also with greater attention paid to environmental elements like the soft fall of light across the composition and the gentle motion of ripples on the surface of the water. Speaking of Pissarro’s work in Eragny, art historian Richard Thomson remarked that “the heavy paint surface and close values recall [Pissarro’s] paintings of the 1860s, although the textures are more varied and the color range is more resonant" (Camille Pissarro, London, 1990, pp. 81-82 and 84). Baigneuses presents a combination of techniques as Pissarro augments the legacy of his 1880s work with a freer and more vigorous handling reminiscent of the 'loaded' paint surfaces of the 1860s.