In 1852, Courbet announced his desire to take on the nude, a genre prized by the Academy. He executed a painting of male nudes, The Wrestlers (Szepmuvezeti Museum, Budapest) as well as this painting, its pendant. He exhibited both in the Salon of 1853, where The Bathers occasioned a critical uproar. The painter Eugène Delacroix, a member of the Salon jury, deplored "the vulgarity of the forms," which did not conform to the idealized nudes of Academic art. Critics expressed their disgust at the dirty feet of the models as well as the fallen stocking of the seated model, seen as emblematic of physical as well as moral squalor. When Napoleon III saw the painting at the Salon, he allegedly feigned whipping the buttocks of the standing nude with his riding crop.

The model for the standing bather has been identified as Henriette Bonnion, who, according to a nineteenth-century source, posed "in naturabilis " in Courbet's Paris studio in the winter of 1853. Bonnion also modeled for the photographer Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, assuming a nearly identical pose in a photograph of the same date. It is not known if the photograph was made before Courbet's painting.