Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryStanding Bather, Seen from the Back
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Compare the bather’s long back with the surrounding vertical foliage, then examine the fragmentary blue lines at the lower left.
This narrow canvas was cut from a larger painting, perhaps by Cézanne himself. The marks at the lower left may be part of another seated figure. Its isolated bather therefore belongs to a composition we no longer see whole, a useful reminder that a painting’s present edges may not be its original ones.
Oil on canvas · 31.7 × 21.6 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Impressionism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Standing Bather, Seen from the Back
- Artist
- Paul Cezanne (French, 1839–1906)
- Date
- 1879-82
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 31.7 × 21.6 cm (12 1/2 × 8 1/2 in.); Framed: 53.4 × 42.3 × 8.9 cm (21 × 16 5/8 × 3 1/2 in.)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Brooks McCormick
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.