Three female bathers FWN 918 1874/5 19 cm x 22
William Adolphe Bougereau Bathers 1884
The first person to acquire a collection of Cezanne’s work was really ‘pere’ Tanguy; the guy who ran the art and craft shop in Montmartre who provided all the Impressionists with oils and artists’ paraphernalia. As most of the Impressionists were struggling budding artists, he would let them have what they wanted in exchange for a painting or two. The first collector proper of Cezanne’s work was Victor Chocquet. Victor worked as a customs officer, and spent all his spare cash buying the art he liked; fortunately, because he liked the new Impressionist stuff, and nobody else did, it was fairly cheap. Victor had been persuaded by his friends that he should not go to the first Impressionist exhibition; it had such bad reports! But, he saw one of Renoir’s paintings at the second Impressionist exhibition, and was so impressed that he asked if Renoir would do a portrait of his wife, Marie Chocquet. After meeting Victor, Renoir knew that he would like Cezanne’s paintings, so he took him to pere Tanguy’s shop; there, Victor bought this small painting, his first Cezanne, for 50 francs, and was delighted. The painting itself is signed by Cezanne in the usual lower left corner; probably specifically for his new friend Victor.
I include one of Bouguereau’s paintings for comparison: his paintings were all the rage at the time; indeed, the Academy awarded him his first honour of becoming a Life Member in the year that Cezanne painted Three Female Bathers, and by the time he died, within 12 months of Cezanne’s death, he had collected another four State Honours. Bouguereau confessed in 1891 that the direction of his mature work was largely a response to the marketplace: "What do you expect, you have to follow public taste, and the public only buys what it likes.”
Cezanne never sought to be led by public taste, just as he would never allow himself to be influenced by the Academy of Beaux Arts. Indeed, for the ten years up to 1870, he had effectively said: “I paint as I see and b******* to the establishment (maniere couillarde).” But now, in these Impressionist years, he was trying to discover how to express the beauty of the female form not in a voluptuous way, nor a way designed ‘to meet the ideals of a New York stockbroker of the black walnut generation.’ (Frank Mather, American Art historian). For me, this little painting is not making a point, but it is ‘raw’; the bathers are not sitting serenely around looking beautiful, but are energetically engaged in their own freedom of expression. Cezanne is also experimenting with shapes: the horizontals of the foreground, and the verticals of the two trees on the right. And experimenting with design: the diagonal tree on the left will, in twenty years’ time, become part of the pyramid shape of his later Grand Bathers. How do you combine in a painting the quality of its being ‘raw’ and yet being fully developed? –this was the question he posed himself.
It would be another few decades before the emergence of the ‘art collector’; or rather before the art collector becomes an ‘art dealer’. By the turn of the century, art dealers would be buying Impressionist paintings and selling them within days for 150% more than they paid. Chocquet was not an art dealer; he was a lover of Impressionist art, and particularly of Cezanne’s art. He would spend hours in the Impressionist Exhibitions talking with the people who visited them, and trying to explain what Impressionism was all about. He was a fervent follower, sealed in friendship. And he was prepared to spend his hard-earned cash to help support the cause in any way he could.
Cezanne and Victor became good friends; and their partners too, Hortense and Marie. Their family friendship was something that Cezanne treasured: his relationship with Hortense was still secret from the family home in Provence; but here in Paris, with the Chocquets, what a breath of fresh air it must have been for Cezanne and Hortense not to be afraid of expressing their relationship openly - like the fullness of a beautiful sunset.
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be.
When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner."
I don't try to control a sunset.
I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
Carl Rogers, psychologist and author of On Becoming a Person.