Bathing Nudes

Held in the Artizon Museum (Ishibashi Foundation Collection) in Tokyo, Bathing Nudes (Suiyoku rafu, 1914) is the largest of the Paris-period canvases that Yasui Sōtarō produced toward the end of his seven-year stay in France and is the work in which the formative influence of Cézanne's bather compositions is most plainly visible. Approximately 128 by 193 cm, the large horizontal painting shows several female figures grouped on the bank of a wooded stream in the constructive parallel-stroke modelling, suppressed local colour and stable pyramidal arrangement that Yasui had taken from his sustained study of Cézanne's late grandes baigneuses at the Salon d'Automne and in the Paris private collections of the early 1910s. The canvas was completed in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War forced his return to Japan, and it travelled with him in the December 1914 crossing as the centrepiece of the Paris work that he showed in his sensational one-man retrospective at the second Nikakai exhibition of October 1915. The painting is recognised as the founding statement of Cézannist yōga in Japan and is one of the central works of Yasui's career.