Femmes fellah au bain 1900

Emile Bernard painted these "Femmes Fellah au bain" sometime in his later career, using oil on canvas. It depicts three women in varying states of dress, presumably peasants from Egypt, where Bernard lived for an extended period. Bernard was part of the Pont-Aven School, a group of artists working in Brittany in the late 19th century. He later fell out with many of his colleagues, including Gauguin. After a stay in Italy, Bernard moved to Egypt in 1893, living there for more than ten years, and adopting a very different style from his earlier Symbolist period. There, Bernard sought to represent what he saw as the timeless, biblical quality of Egyptian peasant life, seeing their traditions as unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs. Here, it's apparent in his reference to classical bathers, updated for a modernizing Egypt. Understanding this painting fully requires considering Bernard’s biography, and how this intersects with the broader history of Orientalism in French art. We need to ask how this image engages with social ideas about race, class, gender, and colonialism.