Colville’s knowledge of art history was wide, and if he was loathe to acknowledge much in the way of contemporary influences, his quoting of Renaissance and earlier painting is constant. Here though, the echoes have a less distant source. The group of bathing women in Six Figures on Beach have unmistakable similarities to the late series of bathers by Paul Cézanne. One, Bathers (1894-1905) is in the collection of the National Gallery in London and likely would have been on view while Colville was working as a war artist there. Colville’s bathers share the partial draping that is found in all the older artist’s bather paintings, though his open beach is less pastoral than the shady, tree-lined stream that Cézanne favoured.
Interestingly, in his late career, Henry Moore too turned to the theme of bathers, with nude groups depicted on an open beach in a work such as Group of Women Bathers (1981) and his small sculpture Three Bathers (After Cézanne) of 1978. No artist who came of age in the early 20th century could ignore Cézanne, of course, and neither Colville nor Moore did. As Colville’s compositional style matured throughout the 1950s, the outright evocation of earlier painters, such as Cézanne, faded. The echoes weren’t gone, however, just buried under the more quotidian scenes he chose to depict. Three Girls on a Wharf (1953), for instance, or June Noon (1963) no longer pay homage overtly to Cézanne, but with a sketch such as Six Figures on Beach we can see how Colville had absorbed and transformed his influence.
- Ray Cronin, 2023
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