Summer Scene (Bathers)

When this painting was first exhibited at the Salon of 1870, critic and artist Zacharie Astruc wrote of Bazille, “The sun inundates his canvases.” It appears that Bazille began this composition in his Paris studio but completed the details of the landscape after traveling to the south of France, where he painted a similar landscape of the river Lez. Although individual figures have been identified as derivations from Italian Renaissance sources, including Andrea Mantegna and Sebastiano del Piombo, the inspiration for the subject may have been the modernist novel Manette Salomon (1867), in which the Goncourt brothers describe a brilliantly lit scene of young men bathing. The artist, one of the most important and influential exponents of the “new painting” that gave rise to impressionism, died in the Franco-Prussian War, four years before the first impressionist exhibition was held.