In the enduring motif of the bather, Christopher Riopelle discovers creative connections between Paul Cezanne and Emil Sands, whose paintings feature in the exhibition The Stories We Tell.
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In 1899, the struggling artist Henri Matisse, not yet thirty, purchased a small, awkward oil painting by Paul Cezanne, Three Bathers (1879–82). He put himself and his young family into financial hardship by doing so but confessed that he could not not buy it. His art depended on it. Thirty-seven years later, and by then rich and famous, Matisse gifted the picture to the Petit Palais in Paris, commenting, ‘I have drawn from it my faith and perseverance.’1 The remark is interpreted, often and surely correctly, as recognition that in his time Cezanne had been the most audacious painter of them all, from whom the questing vision of Matisse and so many others had sprung.
‘Over and again, this uniquely malleable theme, rich in associations at once historical, formal, psychological and physical challenges artists.’
It acknowledges as well that, thanks not least to Cezanne, bather imagery has played a surprisingly large role in the evolution of modern art. Over and again, this uniquely malleable theme, rich in associations at once historical, formal, psychological and physical challenges artists. The body is omnipresent, but so too is nature in harmony or tension with it. The theme ties Antiquity to the Renaissance and Baroque, to Impressionism and what followed – think Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the 1860s, Georges Seurat in the 1880s – to Cubism, and to modern and contemporary bodily concerns. Think Marcel Duchamp. Matisse himself rose to the challenge; see his angular Bathers by a River (1909–17) in the Art Institute of Chicago. Pablo Picasso also boasted a Cezanne ‘bathers’ in his collection. In 1964, National Gallery Artist-Trustee Henry Moore insisted in the face of strident public objection that the gallery acquire Cezanne’s Bathers (1894–1905); he too came to own a ‘bathers’ by the artist and went on to make sculptures based enigmatically on both works. Jasper Johns – yes, he too owns a small male ‘bather’ by Cezanne, owned before him by Edgar Degas – repeatedly returns to the motif. -
‘Aldo’s Dream shows the figure of his sibling not once but three times in close proximity, looking at us, moving away into silvery-blue water, turning back to catch our eye once more.’
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Emil Sands, Aldo's Dream, 2025 -
Young artists should make no small plans. Emil Sands has taken on the daunting subject with new energy. In his own words, bather imagery allows him to explore issues of ‘vulnerability and exposure’.2 His paintings relate to his biography including bodily health (in his case, cerebral palsy), and an intense body consciousness stemming from it. And he is by no means alone in his uncertainty about physicality and physical beauty, or other highly personal issues that come to the fore unsolicited when, on a summer’s day, we find ourselves more-or-less naked, more-or-less in public.
‘Emil Sands has taken on the daunting subject with new energy. In his own words, bather imagery allows him to explore issues of “vulnerability and exposure”.’
First, it must be recognised that Sands knows, and knows how to use, the self-referential strategies of classic modernism. Seurat’s monumental Models of 1886–88 (in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), shows three female nudes posing in the artist’s Paris studio. No, wait, it is something quite impossible – the same model shown three times in different poses, all in the same tight space. Similarly, Sands’s Aldo’s Dream, one of the paintings in the current exhibition, shows the figure of his sibling not once but three times in close proximity, looking at us, moving away into silvery-blue water, turning back to catch our eye once more. Time is rendered inconsequential here, sequence inadequate, in favour of a far richer engagement with a specific persona. As Sands knows, like Seurat before him, our relationships, especially with those closest to us, evolve, mutate, flow. -
Emil Sands, Ripley's Ladder, 2025
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Cezanne would have looked at Sands’s paintings and implicitly understood the issues the artist is dealing with. They were his own. Perhaps more than any other theme, male bathers evoked for Cezanne the deepest emotions and heart-felt memories. Take, for example, his still-startling Bathers at Rest of about 1876–77 (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). Four lads in various stages of undress stand or lie by a stream, physically together but psychologically apart. Back in the 1850s, Cezanne and his male friends, including his closest friend, the writer-to-be, Émile Zola, bathed repeatedly in the countryside near Aix-en-Provence. Zola remembered of his youth there: ‘We remained naked on the sand for hours… It was endless bathing.’ Cezanne briefly returned from Paris to Aix in 1876 which may well have jogged his memory as he set to work on this key painting of his mid-career.
Paul Cezanne, Bathers at Rest, c.1876-77. Oil on canvas. 82.2 × 101.2 cm, 32 3/8 × 39 13/16 in
© The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia‘Cezanne would have looked at Sands’s paintings and implicitly understood the issues the artist is dealing with.’
The following year, with the painting completed but the artist desperate for money – he too, like Matisse, had a family to feed – Cezanne set out to find a buyer. Carrying the work through the streets of Paris, he ran into a friend, Ernest Cabaner, who praised the work. Impulsively the artist gave it to him as a gift. Thus, an image of youthful fellowship became a physical token of friendship. Nor does the knot of personal relations end there. A decade later, in 1886, Zola published his novel The Masterpiece in which he depicted his childhood intimate as a ‘failed’ artist. Following this betrayal, Cezanne never spoke to him again. A decade later, in November 1895, the dealer Ambroise Vollard gave Cezanne his first one-man show in Paris. Bathers at Rest hung not on the wall of his gallery but in the window facing the street. Cezanne’s profoundest concerns, both personal and aesthetic, were exposed, made naked for the world to see. -
Emil Sands, Rising Skies, 2025
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In this context, I want to look at what is arguably the most ambitious and complicated painting by Sands of the four here. Ripley’s Ladder is a vertical canvas showingsome ten bathing figures growing smaller as they move away from us into limpid water. Most are seen from the rear; one at least turns back. The closest, a bearded young man seated in the foreground, is cut off by the edge of the canvas at the upper right. It is a motif suggesting the fleeting and instantaneous, like a ‘bad’ snapshot, which painters have explored since the invention of photography – think Edgar Degas. The man observes the entire scene, his gaze, like ours, diving into deep space, calculating the meaning of the relations unfolding in front of him. Is this Ripley? If so, he evokes the ‘hero’ of Patricia Highsmith’s mordant novel, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) of class envy, naked ambition and friendship betrayed. Tension sets in, and yet the beauty and tranquillity of the scene remain unperturbed.
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Emil Sands, Green Tide Princess, 2025
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Here I think we see the originality of Sands’s treatment of his bather imagery. If Cezanne most often crowds his figures to the front of the canvas in a relatively small, sometimes claustrophobic landscape, Sands does the opposite. Beaches are broad; sky and water, often similar in silvery tonality, take up far more of the visual field than people. Figures dwindle quickly in size as they move into deep and masterfully controlled perspectival space. (So-called aerial perspective is something of a lost art in landscape painting but Sands revives it here.) Even if people are powerfully present to the artist psychologically – his mother in Rising Skies, his brother in Aldo’s Dream – nature is nonetheless indifferent to them. Sands achieves a thrilling balance between the psychological intensity of his human relations and the placid equanimity of nature. He also, and not without humour, finds a metaphor for a particularly contemporary obliviousness to nature and the near-naked body: in Green Tide Princess, a teenager on the beach in a bikini is indifferent to anything except the latest text pinging in from a friend on her mobile phone, exactly as she would be on a busy street, taking the bus or bored at the back of a classroom.Christopher Riopelle
The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London
Text © Christopher Riopelle1 J. J. Rishel and K. Sachs, Cézanne & Beyond (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art Museum, 2009), p. 34.
2 Emil Sands in conversation with Eleanor Nairne, online: https://review.kasmingallery.com/weekend-long-reads/emil-sands-in-conversation-with-eleanor-nairne/. -
The Stories We Tell: Tidawhitney Lek, Emil Sands,
Khalif Tahir Thompson
