The Bathers

The Bathers shows four young Tahitian women gathered at the edge of a stream, their olive-gold bodies modelled in broad, flat passages of colour that owe far more to the memory of the South Seas than to anything observable out of doors. Painted in 1897 during Paul Gauguin’s second voyage to Tahiti, when he sought an art of ideas and great simplified forms, the canvas reduces the figures to grand, sculptural silhouettes. The cool blue shading that runs through their flesh and the dense wall of green behind them give the scene an air of timeless, fruitful Eden.