The Bathers

The Bathers is a painting by Gustave Courbet, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1853, where it caused a major scandal. It was unanimously attacked by art critics for the huge nude woman at its centre and the sketchy landscape background, both against official artistic canons. It was bought for 3000 francs by Courbet's future friend Alfred Bruyas, an art collector - this acquisition allowed the artist to become financially and artistically independent. It is signed and dated in the bottom right hand corner on a small rock. The painter had already experienced his first successes in France, Belgium and Germany, with some major figures of the Second French Republic buying his works. He had won a medal and resumed exhibited at the Paris Salon. In summer 1852 he returned to the female nude, which he had previously treated in The Bacchante (possibly 1847) and Sleeping Blonde Woman (1849, private collection) - the latter included a similar figure to the central figure in The Bathers. Almost 34, Courbet wrote to his parents on 13 May 1853: My paintings are received by the jury these days without any kind of objection. I am considered as let in by the public and beyond judgement. They have finally left responsibility for my paintings up to me. I annex ground every day. All Paris is waiting to see them and to hear the noise they will make. As for The Bathers, it's a bit scary, but since then I've added a cloth over the buttocks. The landscape in this painting is generally successful. Despite his reassurances he also wrote of wanting more success in a similar way to a letter to them dated May 1852 - "annex" is a translation of "empiète", a military term. As he hoped, the work caused a scandal at the next Salon on 15 May 1853. It had a prime position in the hang, at eye-height unlike its pendant The Wrestlers. The rendering was very different to the more accepted style established by Ingres and the female nude did not fit the then-current ideals of Romantic and Neoclassical painting. The poet and critic Théophile Gautier wrote in La Presse on 21 July that in The Bathers he saw "a kind of Hottentot Venus getting out of the water, and turning towards the spectator a monstrous rump with padded dimples at the bottom which only lack the mark of passementerie". Gautier thus contrasted a civilised classical Venus with what he saw as the uncivilised African savagery of Courbet's image. Distancing himself from Titian and Rubens, Courbet had broken the artistic hierarchy of genres, combining a naked ordinary woman within a landscape of the Franche-Comté to make a scene of everyday life. Such a combination had first been attempted at the start of the 17th century by the Le Nain brothers, who had shown posing peasants looking at the viewer, and by painters of the Dutch and Flemish Golden Ages. The large format was also usually then reserved for religious and mythological paintings and portraits of princes. France's rising urban population also made intellectuals wish both to reject the rural world and to idealise it in a pseudo-pantheistic fashion.