Bather in the Woods

Camille Pissarro

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Painted in 1895, Bather in the Woods depicts a solitary nude female figure poised at the edge of a stream or grassy bank within a secluded woodland setting, her back turned toward the viewer as dappled light filters through the surrounding foliage. The work belongs to a series of bather compositions that Pissarro pursued between 1894 and 1896, representing a rare and deliberate excursion into the nude figure for an artist whose practice had been predominantly devoted to landscape and rural peasant subjects. Stylistically, the painting reflects Pissarro's ongoing engagement with divisionist technique while incorporating more naturalistic tendencies in its rendering of light across the figure and landscape. Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist painter, born in 1830 in Charlotte Amalie on the island of Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies, and is widely regarded as one of the central founding figures of the Impressionist movement.