Bather With Outstretched Arms (recto); Study of a Tree (verso)1874/77
A nude bather stands with arms flung wide, sketched in graphite in the mid-1870s, a figure related to the bathers that Cézanne returned to throughout his career. More about this work
About this work
A nude bather stands with arms flung wide, sketched in graphite in the mid-1870s, a figure related to the bathers that Cézanne returned to throughout his career. He rarely worked from the nude model, relying instead on memory, earlier drawings and the study of art, and the figure has an awkward, expressive energy. On the back of the sheet is a study of a tree, a reminder that figure and landscape were always intertwined in his thinking.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
A work made of graphite on cream laid paper (pieced).
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Graphite
- Pencil. Graphite has been used for drawing since the 1500s; in 1795 Nicolas-Jacques Conté mixed it with clay, so its hardness could be graded.
- Laid paper
- Handmade on a mould of close-set wires, which leave fine parallel lines you can see when the sheet is held to the light.
Paul Cézanne
French, 1839–1906 · Born and died in Aix-en-Provence.
Cézanne divided his life between Paris and his native Aix-en-Provence. Encouraged by his schoolfriend Émile Zola and later by Pissarro, with whom he painted at Pontoise and Auvers in the 1870s, he showed at the first and third Impressionist exhibitions. He then withdrew to Provence and worked towards a more structured art, building form from patches of colour in still lifes, bathers and repeated views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Younger painters, Picasso and Braque among them, saw him as a founder of modern painting.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Post-Impressionism
Artists who kept Impressionism's colour but pushed towards structure, symbol and feeling.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 2019.840
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Paul Cézanne
All their works
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