Name: Cezanne's Large Bathers: Painting Raw Experience
Uploaded: 2025-09-10T13:08:14.000Z
Duration: 7 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The Large Bathers by Paul Cézanne is a painting that dawns on you.

At first you see the whole, a group of women bathing by a river, a subject that's anything but original.

Basic passive voice

The canvas is composed in a balanced geometry of triangles, one for the group on the left, one for those on the right, and one comprising them all, bounded by the leaning trees.

But after a minute, you start to notice things, like the figures behind the river, or the swimmer in the water, or, almost disturbingly, that none of the bathers have any definable faces, or that their bodies seem to fold into one another, as if they'd been painted over but not completely.

The more you stare at it, the more the canvas seems a chaos of elements, deliriously rendered, with a spontaneity that feels almost negligent.

Of course, we know that Cézanne labored on this painting for seven years, all the way up to his death.

Spontaneity is certainly part of the message, but the painter was intensely purposeful in what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to convey it.

From our perspective, across the gulf of cubism and all imaginable forms of abstraction, it's hard for Cézanne's distortions of color and form to shock us.

Yet that's exactly what they did in 1906 at the painting's first exhibition.

It's not wrong to say that Cézanne initiated what became the 20th century's endless experimentation.

As Picasso himself said, Cézanne is the father of us all.

In this way, he can sort of be seen as the bridge between what came before and all that was to come.

The large bathers' reaches in the past—recalling similar scenes of nudes or bathers like those by Titian or Nicolas Poussin or Thomas Eakins, among others—certain of the figures evoke postures from older works.

The woman on the left, striding upwards with the tree, for example, bears a resemblance to an 18th century sculpture of the goddess Diana.

Or take the woman on the right, here, whose raised knee and shoulders remember the classical

And perhaps it should be noted that none of the fourteen women we see here were drawn from real models.

Cézanne took his examples from other works and picture books, adding to that disquieting sense of remove that these figures have from any identifiable personalities.

That remove, that alienation, is echoed everywhere in the painting.

Of the fourteen women, six are simply turned away from the viewer.

A few are even in the process of dissolving or emerging from the foliage all around them.

Most unsettling of all, the figures are pocked with areas of white which, on closer examination, proves not to be any paint at all but the bare canvas itself, interrupting the scene as if some force from a world beyond.

What are the effects of his short, flat brush strokes, of distilling everything into its geometrical basis, or freezing in paint that which doesn't appear to be a scene at all but something on the verge of becoming a scene, or else of dissolving out of one?

Cézanne is emerging out of Impressionism, a movement that was obsessed with how colors and light really appeared to the eye.

How did the atmosphere, the rain or the sunset, affect the visual impression of the observer?

The Impressionists explored this by going out into nature and painting rapidly, applying just what they saw to the canvas in front of them.

Cézanne took the palette of the Impressionists, retaining the brilliant, often surprising colors used to evoke nature's effect on us, but he took color a step further and applied it to express form as well.

Ever since the Renaissance, depth was rendered via perspective.

Cézanne seems to realize that Renaissance perspective is only a kind of code by which we understand the third dimension in a canvas.

Seeing itself, the perception as distinct from the understanding, may not work on those principles.

This is why he didn't shy away from distortion of objects, of using colors to bring elements in the background forward or melt things in the foreground into the architecture of colors that hold them there.

There's a difference between the way we know what we see and how we actually see it.

Our minds are so incredibly good at taking the anarchic varieties of sensible experience and within milliseconds composing them into intelligible wholes.

It happens so fast that we can't even access that actual moment of perception.

And for the most part, we should be happy about that.

Because raw experience, like a kind of trauma, is just too much for us to withstand.

In The Large Bathers, Cézanne uses his various techniques to visit that moment of perception.

Confronted with it aesthetically, all that's unsettling about experience is frozen for our contemplation.

In life, it's a bridge we just can't cross.

Take a look at that man on the other side of the river.

Many think that this figure is Cézanne himself, situated between the classical constructed diorama of bathers and the pastoral, impressionistic church scene in the distance.

I'd bet if we could turn the painting around and see it from that perspective, it would look just as sensual, erotic, and beautiful as something by Titian or any other painter who depicted a similar scene in the past.

But from our vantage, the one Cézanne gave to us, we're allowed a fugitive access to something far more disturbing.

Hey everybody, if you want to help me keep making these videos, I'm doing a big push for Patreon pledges.

Everything helps, as little as $1 per video.

It really is the pledges that allow me to continue making this channel, and the more

I get, the more time and effort I can spend on making really cool stuff, and I have a lot of stuff in the works right now, which is going to be really great.

If you think the Nerdwriter is something that you're not seeing anywhere else and you want to see more of it, pledging is really the way to help me.

So thank you so much, and here are some more videos.