Scène d'été
painting by Frédéric Bazille
Scène d'été, Summer Scene, or The Bathers is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Frédéric Bazille from 1869. It is now in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Impressionist painting depicts young men dressed in swimsuits having a leisurely day along the banks of the Lez river near Montpellier. Bazille composed the painting by first drawing the human figures in his Paris studio and then transporting the drawings to the outdoor setting. Like his earlier painting Réunion de famille (1867), Scène d'été captured friends and family members in the outdoors. Scène d'été was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1870.
It may have been an inspiration for Thomas Eakins' The Swimming Hole (1885), as Eakins was in Paris in 1870 and could have seen Bazille's painting.
Background
After his painting Le Pêcheur à L'épervier (1868) was rejected from the Salon, Bazille was spurred to paint a larger and more ambitious work, including not two, but eight figures set in nature. He sought to create a more developed and mature painting in the same style and evoking similar sentiments. Bazille first conceived of Scène d'été in April, 1869, and he initially intended the work to depict nude figures, as revealed by his personal letters.
“Scène d'été” enters the record as painting by Frédéric Bazille. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scène, d'été and painting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Scène d'été” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Scène, d'été and painting provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7439713. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1869, 1867, 1870 and 1885.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scène d'été” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.