Dancing Bathers

Dancing Bathers (German title: Tanz im Bad) is an oil painting by Cuno Amiet of 1891, executed on canvas mounted on plywood and measuring only 35 by 52 centimetres; signed and dated 'CA / 91' in red at lower right, it has remained in private hands and was shown at Langenthal in 1998.

Amiet painted this small panel at the end of his student years. After training under Frank Buchser in Solothurn he entered the Munich academy in the autumn of 1886, and in October 1888 he moved on to Paris, where he and Giovanni Giacometti studied together at the Académie Julian. The bather subject reaches back to his Swiss beginnings: as early as 1887 he had sketched a girl bathing by a stream in a sober grey-green realism.

Two nude women move hand in hand through the shallow water of a tree-shaded stream, while a small third figure lingers farther back among the bushes. Amiet wraps one dancer in a cascade of glinting sunlight that turns her long hair to sparkling red-gold. The catalogue raisonné hears in this light-transfigured motif an echo of the paradise scenes of maidens at watercourses that Buchser had painted around 1885 and 1886, yet it stresses how far Amiet's playful experiment stands from the older master's smoothly naturalistic idylls.

The panel's later history is quiet: private collections from 1961 onward, a colour reproduction on page 17 of the Langenthal exhibition catalogue of 1998, and continued private ownership after 2008.