The alternative title “Study from the Nude,” as Camesasca notes (1987, p. 67), is an indication of the fact that the work Bathers the Seine was frequently considered to be a study. The resulting ambiguity is typical of Manet. The Bathers point to the concepts and practices of a studio, of the study of a model. In this sense the work is situated in a “premodern” mental universe, with little in the way of affinity with Impressionism. The erudite culture of the work is clear in the allusions to mythological iconography of the type “Diana Bathing,” so evident as to be hardly worth mentioning. On the other hand, Manet’s vision was totally transfigured. Not so much because it totally abolished the limits between a study and a finished painting, but because it brings a radical solution to the challenge of constructing a form without a design, not even a sfumato, of the construction of a sensual body rhythm which needs neither the dynamic of masses in chiaroscuro, nor the calligraphic line, but responds to the ultimate challenge of proposing a purely pictorial insertion – without the support of any optical device – of the figure in a deep space.
With the discovery (Tabarant 1947, p. 248, n. 606) of a preparatory watercolor for the work, preserved in Lucerne, Switzerland, which he dated in 1874, the dating of the Masp canvas, situated around 1876 (Jamot, Wildenstein, and Bataille, 1932, n. 264) may be slightly early, however Camesasca (1987, p. 68) ventures that the watercolor may be a copy of the oil on canvas. Camesasca also emphasizes the relationship of the composition with the emergence of photography and places the scene probably on the banks of the Seine, close to the Manet properties in Gennevilliers. Affinities in style have been noted and the consequent chronological approximation deduced regarding this Manet masterpiece and the two famous Couples on a Boat of 1874, hanging in Tournai, Musée des Beaux-Arts and in New York’s Metropolitan Museum (Bardi 1979, p. 50; Camesasca 1987, p. 70).
— Unknown authorship, 1998
