Bathers (Summer Scene) – (Jean Frederic Bazille) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Jean Frederic Bazille

Style: Impressionism

Topic: Summer Men Baths Scenes Lakes

Date: 1869

Museum: Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, United States)

Technique: Oil On Canvas

Scène d'été, or Summer Scene, is an oil painting by Frédéric Bazille, completed in 1869, a year before his death in 1870. The impressionist painting depicts young men dressed in swimsuits having a leisurely day along the banks of a river near Méric. Bazille achieved the look he wanted for the painting by first drawing the human figures in his Paris studio and then transporting the drawings to the outdoor setting. Like his earlier painting Réunion de famille (1850), Scène d'été captured friends and family members in the outdoors and was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1870.
It may have been an inspiration for Thomas Eakins' The Swimming Hole (1885), as Eakins was in Paris in 1870 and could have seen Bazille's painting. It is currently housed in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In Summer Scene, by contrast, the more numerous figures who disport themselves in the out of doors are all semi-clothed. Two men wrestle in the sunlit middle-distance; a boy swims in the foreground, while another swimmer in bathing trunks is being helped from the water by a bearded man in trousers at the right, who resemebles artist himself. ANother in bathing trunks reclines indolenlty on the bank in the pose of an ancient river god and looks intently across the space toward a man in the distance who has just begun to remove his clothes.