A false Puvis, or a monster

So how did people actually take it? About the way new things usually get taken: with a shrug from most and a snarl from a few. Out from under the Salon’s roof and onto the rebel walls of the Indépendants, the Bathers got mixed early notices rather than instant glory.

The critic Paul Alexis reached for the unkindest comparison he could find and called it a false Puvis de Chavannes (a revered older painter of pale, calm, frieze-like murals), though even he conceded the picture had conviction. The insult is also a tell: the stillness and the friezelike spacing that made critics think of Puvis are exactly the qualities people now admire in it. When the painting traveled to New York in 1886, shown by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel at the National Academy of Design, a reviewer for the Sun reached for blunter words still and called it, in effect, monstrous and vulgar.

Treat those exact quotes lightly, as the flavor of the reception rather than gospel wording. The shape of it is what counts: a huge, strange, deliberate picture by an unknown young man, landing as a puzzle. People did not quite know what to do with the calm of it, the smoke in it, the seriousness it spent on so plain a scene. The not-knowing is the point. The Bathers was early.