The Bathers - Dated 1923.

Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, monogrammed and dated lower right; signed and dated on the back.

Dimensions: 45 x 16 cm, with frame: 59.5 x 30.5 cm.

Casimir Reymond's painting is strong and graphic. Its colors are intense and tangy. Its bold formats. The influence of the sculptor is already present in his painting. "He saw shapes, volumes in nature, like a sculptor".

Our painting, bathers by the sea, with stylized shapes and volume, in bright and contrasting colors, painted in an atypical format testifies to this.

For Edith Carey, author of the reference monograph devoted to the artist, the work of Casimir Reymond is "plural". This is one of the reasons why Reymond is a difficult artist to identify. He was a designer, painter and sculptor at the same time. He was influenced by great painter such as Ferdinand Hodler or Paul Cézanne. His artistic journey is made of breaks and changes of style. He explored a lot, experimented even in his signatures which were varied.

Painter and sculptor, originally from Vaulion, in the Vaudois Jura, Casimir Reymond studied at the School of Fine Arts in Geneva.

Eugène Gillard, a teacher who had a great impact on him, introduced him to avant-garde art through painters such as Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne.

The young artist's future as a painter is very promising. At barely twenty, he presented 180 paintings and drawings in a solo exhibition in Lausanne. Felix Vallotton advises him to go to Paris for a career. He went there in 1922 and stayed there for ten years.

To make himself known to critics, art dealers and collectors, he will exhibit in Parisian salons such as the Salon d'Automne, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants or the Salon des Tuileries. It receives very rave reviews.

In 1932, he taught at the cantonal school of drawing and applied art in Lausanne, which he directed in 1933-1934 and from 1945 to 1955.

Casimir Reymond has also established himself in sculpture, particularly monumental, thanks to public commissions. We owe him a sculpture of Mary at St Paul's Church in Vienna and   many of her sculptures that adorn the city of Lausanne, including that of the Caryatids of the Federal Tribunal of Lausanne.

He received the Wilhelm Gimmi Prize in 1969 shortly before his death.