Bathers by a River

This is a very large painting in oil on canvas, about two and a half metres tall and almost four metres wide. It shows women bathing by a river, but it feels more like a wall of shapes than a quiet outdoor scene. The background is split into four tall vertical bands. Across the front stand the nude figures, their bodies long and column-like. The colours are restricted, mostly gray, pink, white, black, blue and green. The mood is serious and still, with little of the ease you might expect from a picture of bathers.

Start with the heads. Each one is a smooth oval with no face, so the figures feel anonymous and silent. Next, find the thick black vertical band. It stands for the river, which was once blue, and it cuts through the picture like a dark slab rather than flowing water. Then look at the bands behind the figures, where plants and foliage are reduced to flat areas of colour. Notice how the bodies themselves are built from stiff, simplified shapes, not soft curves. Together these parts give the painting its heavy, almost severe feeling.

Henri Matisse began this canvas in 1909 and 1910. A Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin, had asked for two large paintings to decorate the staircase of his home in Moscow. Matisse proposed three pastoral scenes, meaning peaceful images of country life. Shchukin bought only two, Dance II and Music. Matisse came back to the rejected third canvas four years later, in 1913. He changed its soft pastel colours and reordered the figures, influenced by his new interest in Cubism. He kept working on it until 1916 and 1917.

Matisse counted this among the five most pivotal works of his career, because it carried his style through nearly a decade of change. Compare it with Dance II and Music, which are graceful and lyrical, meaning song-like and flowing. This painting is sober, and even hints at danger. That may partly reflect his worries during the war that raged while he finished it. Before you move on, look again at the black band running down the picture, and think about how it turns a river into something heavy and unsettling.