Return from a Swim

Józef Pankiewicz (1866-1940) first stayed in Saint-Tropez in 1908. Over the next several years, he spent summers there in the company of Pierre Bonnard, formerly a member of the Nabis and one of the greatest French Post-Impressionists. they were drawn to each other by their similar approach to issues in painting. During his stay in the south of France, Pankiewicz painted luminous landscapes, views of the harbour of Saint-Tropez, and still lifes. The paintings Return from a Swim and Landscape from Provence with Idyllic Scenes are among the most remarkable of these works due to the scale of the composition and the presence of figures in them. In Return from a Swim, the artist shows a groups of women walking along a path with the bay of Saint-Tropez in the background. The women visible in the foreground are the wives of the two artists, Marta Bonnard and Wanda Pankiewicz. The broad landscape is dominated by vegetation and the blue of the sky. It is from the shades of these colours that Pankiewicz builds his composition. He has made colour a construction element of the work, bringing together optically a form which is fractured by an excess of detail. The artist makes the visual centre of the painting the outline of his wife, dressed in a pink dress and holding red flowers in her hand.