Key facts
Painted around 1912 by Maurice Denis, while staying at his Breton villa “Silencio,” Bathers at Perros-Guirec belongs to a long series of beach scenes the Nabi painter devoted to the Pink Granite Coast. The work combines geometry inherited from Cézanne’s Bathers with a palette that “Mediterraneanises” the Breton shore under a brilliant light. Denis unites the seaside spectacle with an almost sacred vision of nature and femininity. The oil on canvas, held at the Petit Palais, bears a dedication to his friend, the Nabi painter and sculptor Georges Lacombe.
I am particularly fond of this canvas because it tells, better than many others, the intimate story of a painter and a place. Maurice Denis did not simply paint Perros-Guirec in passing: he owned a house there, raised his family there, and painted there for more than thirty years.
In 1908, Denis purchased the villa “Silencio y Descanso” (“silence and rest”), a neo-medieval house overlooking the beach at Trestrignel, in Perros-Guirec. He made it his summer residence and kept a studio there until his death in 1943. It was there, facing the sea, that he painted this scene of bathers around 1912, a canvas he would later inscribe as a dedication to his friend Georges Lacombe, himself a sculptor and painter close to the Nabi group.
This Bathers at Perros-Guirec is not an isolated case: Brittany’s beaches form one of the great recurring themes in Denis’s work, a coastline he had known since childhood. Here we find his taste for geometricised figures, inherited from his close study of Cézanne’s Bathers, but handled with a heightened intensity of colour typical of these years, when Fauvism was upending French painting.
Bathers at Perros-Guirec
Pale sand fills the foreground at Trestrignel. Bathers settle in, standing or reclining, some undressed with a wholly classical modesty, others still in light dresses. The red and yellow stripes of a bathing costume become, under Denis’s brush, pure passages of colour, almost abstract. Further off, the Pointe du Château juts into a deep blue sea, firmly anchoring the scene in the real topography of Perros-Guirec. A dense, warm light bathes the whole scene in an almost Mediterranean clarity, a Brittany reimagined by the sun.
Maurice Denis
Maurice Denis bought the villa Silencio in 1908, above the beach at Trestrignel. From then on he spent most of his summers there with his family, and painted a great many canvases devoted to the seaside motif. Bathers at Perros-Guirec, c. 1912, belongs to this vein. Its composition follows rigorous geometric lines that Denis borrowed directly from his study of Cézanne‘s Bathers, a painter he admired and helped establish as a master of modern art. The colour, however, owes more to the moment: painted at the same time as Fauvism, the canvas displays vivid tones that “Mediterraneanise” a Breton coastline whose light is, in reality, far greyer than that of the south. For Denis, a theorist of the Nabi movement and a devout Catholic, this scene of play and bathing is never a merely picturesque pretext: the bathers’ playful activity, in its very naivety, pays tribute, in his view, to the divine nature of creation.
A quiet happiness
There is a quiet happiness in this canvas. Here Denis paints the happy days he spent at Perros-Guirec, far from the bustle of Paris, surrounded by his family. The dedication to Georges Lacombe is a reminder that this painting also belongs to a circle of friendship: that of the Nabis, the group of young artists who, twenty years earlier, had taken as their name a Hebrew word meaning “prophets.” In 1925, as his career reached its peak, Denis would express his attachment to this landscape in no uncertain terms: nature, he said in essence, had never appeared as beautiful to him as it did at Perros-Guirec. Look at the canvas with that confidence in mind: every figure, every touch of colour carries a little of that gratitude.
Current: a new exhibition devoted to Maurice Denis’s personal collection
From 7 May 2026 to 31 January 2027, the Musée départemental Maurice Denis, housed in the painter’s former home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, presents Maurice Denis, Collector: Bonnard, Gauguin, Sérusier… This new exhibition reveals, for the first time, the artist’s personal collection: nearly 150 works by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Sérusier, and Maillol, among others. It recreates the atmosphere of his various homes, including his house-studio. It is supported by the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée de Pont-Aven, and several regional fine arts museums. An opportunity to better understand the artistic and social world, the very one that connected Denis to Georges Lacombe, from which a painting such as Bathers at Perros-Guirec emerged.
Source: Musée départemental Maurice Denis
Further Context
- Bathers at Perros-Guirec, by Maurice Denis, between 1909 and 1912
- 98 x 122 cm
- Paris Museums, Petit Palais, Museum of Fine Arts of the City of Paris
- https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/petit-palais/oeuvres/baigneuses-a-perros-guirec
