Surprisingly, this is the only copy Cézanne made after a statue whose pose must have interested him greatly, since he based a number of his bathers on it throughout his career. Hermes Fixing His Sandal is an antique replica in the Louvre of a famous Greek work attributed to Lysippus. Cézanne's bather, likewise leaning forward to the right, its right leg raised, appears both as a male figure in the mid-1870s (Venturi, Lionello. Cézanne, son art--son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris, 1936, nos. 273-74, 276) and as a female figure some thirty years later (ibid., nos. 719, 721). The same figure type also appears as a woman taking her bath indoors, in a watercolor of the mid 1880s (Rewald, John. Paul Cézanne: The Watercolors. Boston, 1983, no. 144), and as a small, schematic figure of indeterminate sex earlier in this sketchbook (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-38a). Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 183.