Bathers

About

Bathing lets art show bodies unclothed for an ordinary reason, and the subject has swung between myth, desire and daily routine. Old Masters usually needed a story: Diana surprised by Actaeon, or Susanna spied on by the elders. Rembrandt's A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654) drops the pretext and shows a woman lifting her shift as she wades.

The 19th century brought bathers into modern life. Georges Seurat painted working men resting by the Seine in Bathers at Asnières (1884), Edgar Degas drew women crouching in shallow tubs as if unobserved, and Paul Cézanne built The Large Bathers (c. 1898–1905) into an arching pyramid of nudes and trees. In Japan, Hashiguchi Goyō's woodblock print of a woman bathing (1915) revived ukiyo-e elegance. The swimming pool later took over: David Hockney's A Bigger Splash (1967) shows only the white burst left by an unseen diver.