Les Baigneuses (Women Bathing)

The term School of Watteau is sometimes used to describe a group of artists who imitated the style of the great 18th-century master, Antoine Watteau. Such a one was Pater, who was also the only one of them to have studied, albeit for a short time, under Watteau himself. It was Watteau who introduced the fete galante to art, a type of painting to which Pater devoted himself almost exclusively. Such a work is this image of women bathing, a subject he returned to on numerous occasions. The elegantly painted canvas with its delicately treated, somewhat risque subject, provides evidence that Pater's borrowings from his teacher's style were generally somewhat superficial. The soft, light colour scheme is elegant and decorative but has none of the master's colouristic wealth and play of reflections and nuances. The painting has no emotional tonality of the kind which created the very specific poetic atmosphere of Watteau's works.