Two Bathing Women and a Figure from Behind
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Three female nudes at a beach — one at the left seen from behind with her body painted in flat sage-green with teal outlines, one seated at center in warm pink-tan with blue-gray contour lines, and one kneeling at the right in dark terra cotta with her arms raised to her hair. A small sailboat is visible in the upper right against bands of brown, purple, and blue suggesting water and sky. The composition is compressed and overlapping, the three bodies filling the sheet edge to edge. The color is applied in flat, opaque washes — each figure a different tone — with the contours drawn loosely on top in a contrasting color. The whole thing is built from interlocking planes of muted color: sage, teal, pink, brown, ochre, purple, navy. Gestel was one of the founders of Dutch modernism alongside Mondrian and Sluijters, and spent summers at the Bergen School artists' colony on the North Sea coast.