Baigneuses sur la Rance
This conversation is connected to Baigneuses sur la Rance.
Émile Othon Friesz painted Baigneuses sur la Rance in 1935, returning to the same Brittany river he'd painted years earlier. By the 1930s, Friesz had long moved past his Fauvist period and was working in a structured, Cézanne-influenced style rooted in the French classical landscape tradition. Five bathers rest on a grassy bank among thin trees, with the Rance river reflecting greens and yellows behind them. The figures are solidly modeled but loosely painted, integrated into the landscape with the same thick, curving brushwork used for the foliage and water. Friesz painted bather compositions throughout his later career — a subject with a long lineage in French painting from Poussin through Cézanne.