Bathing Women
Bathing women have been an art motif since time immemorial. They feature on Greek vases and pottery as well as in Roman frescos and mosaics, and almost every painter in history has devoted one or more paintings to them. Rubens and Fragonard, for example, painted very sensuous bathers in provocative poses. When a bather in a Rubens painting allows a piece of cloth to fall over her loins, it only accentuates her nakedness and the erotic character of her pose, and the viewer feels like a voyeur. The bathing women of Cezanne and Renoir, by contrast, are more chaste and modest. Willem Hofhuizen’s bathing women alternate between provocative/voluptuous and modest/chaste. Sometimes the bathers' clothes hide their nakedness, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the women are fully clothed, sometimes they wear no clothes at all. Sometimes they blend in with the natural scenery, sometimes they are very much in the foreground.
