Paul Cézanne was born in 1839, and was soon taken with art, and was eager to learn more about it. However, his father, a successful businessman wanted him to study law. While he did this, Cézanne also took art classes on side at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Aix, France. It was "a period of flux and uncertainty for Cézanne" (Encyclopedia of World Biography). He lived in constant doubt of his work, this fear mainly stemming from lack of support from his friends and other collegues. It was only towards the end of his life when he began gaining confidence in his paintings that he publically displayed them and created a positive image for himself.

Cézanne matured during a transformational time period for art, the movement from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. Impressionism was the style of art that filled the canvas with bright colors and uneven brushstrokes (see our discussion of Mary Cassatt). However, the main idea of Impressionism was to create a painting that looked flat like a painting, rather than trying to replicate reality. Some of the artists that thrived in this period were Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro (and many of their paintings are placed near this work). Cézanne went to study with Pissarro, one of the Impressionists who was most influential on his work.  It was during this time that Cézanne discovered the Post-Impressionism. He learned that his art should represent nature and natural things. By reflecting on this idea, Cézanne discovered the founding idea for this new era of art. One of the major styles of Post-Impressionism is to create depth into the work, and to try to make it seem as though the viewer is looking through a window into the art. It is said that "impressionism transformed the Western conception of landscape painting from timeless and nostalgic idealizations of distant places to brightly colored, seemingly accurate representations of existing, often familiar sites seen at specific moments" (Rubin, 1126). As Post-Impressionism became the more dominant style, artists that came after Cézanne began to take the concept of adding shape and depth to art, and began driving art towards Cubism.

At first glance, the most notable aspect of Large Bathers is the sheer scale. The painting is about six by seven feet large, leading some to question whether "Large" is in reference to the bathers or the painting as a whole. Also, where displayed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a large octogonal room with a large bath is in the room next to the painting, adding to the setting and almost making the viewer feel like an actual bather. Secondly, the geometric influence in Large Bathers is very apparent, in the form of a triangle. The two sets of tree trunks rising from the ground on the left and right side of the painting ascending to the center, along with the horizontal stream at the bottom of the painting form a distinguished triangle. This symbolizes the use of shapes of Cézanne that would lead to cubism. Also, many think that a woman's face can be subliminally found within the triangle, where the trees represent hair, the branches forming to the inside of the triangle form eyes, and bushes in the stream form a mouth. Cézanne also adds depth to the painting in different ways; the first is color. The foreground of the painting has bright tan color on the bathers and the ground. Then in the background the color becomes bluer. This is a way to differentiate what is supposed to be closer to the viewer and further away. Cézanne also created depth by leaving parts of the canvas bare. While some critics complained of the lack of color, but "the way he painted, the canvas, though bare, geometrically plays as important a part as the parts that were covered with pigment" (Rewald, 112). This means that it added extra shape to the painting. The second is focus, where the bathers are more detailed than the people, plants, and building in the background.  In these simple expressions of geometry and depth, Cézanne helped transition art from Impressionism to Cubism.