The Bather

Philadelphia native Stewardson considered "The Bather," his first and only life-size figure, a study in form. The realistic seated nude, free of symbolic content, elegantly arranges her hair. At the Paris Salon of 1890, Stewardson was awarded an honorable mention for his plaster model. After he drowned in a sailing accident off Newport, Rhode Island, in 1892, his father arranged for the sculpture to be translated to marble in Paris by the French sculptor Agathon Léonard. In 1895, perhaps at the suggestion of his son’s former teacher Thomas Eakins, the senior Stewardson also had a bronze made from the plaster cast. Both this bronze and a plaster sketch of the work attributed to Stewardson are in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.