In Bathers, Seurat’s successful use of adjacent complimentary colors allowed the vibrancy of color itself to convey a mood of tranquility. The serene mood of the painting can surely be attributed to the Seurat’s scientific portrayal of “calm” which he discusses in his letter. The cool blue water balances with the more vibrant greens and orange to create the balance of warm and cool colors that Seurat described in his 1890 letter. In Bathers, the vibrant cleanliness and purity of the colors themselves translates into the impression that the middle class men are being purified and cleansed by this relaxation ritual. A smooth white pervades the entirety of Bathers: the skin of the bathers, the coat of the man in the bowler hat, the piles of clothes. Even the factories in the background give off not a dirty black smoke, but white-gray cloudlike puffs. Contrasting with the white, the bright oranges and prominent blacks in the clothing of the bathers adds to the sense of purity and cleanliness. The colors are all vibrant. There are hardly any earth colors, mostly bright blues, oranges, greens, whites and blacks. The repeated use of orange on blue (hair, hat, and shorts with water), black on white (the clothes worn by the reclining man, pile of clothes) red on green (dog, rims of hat and grass) as dictated by the principle of complimentary colors adds to the color intensity that strikes the viewer even upon first glance. Through the simple use of pure, vibrant colors Bathers is able to convey a mood and a message to the viewer. The mood is the serenity that the bathers experience and the message is that by removing himself from the city to the suburbs for a day, a man can rejuvenate himself physically and mentally.
Despite Bather’s success in conveying meaning purely through color, Seurat began to replace his interest in color for an interest in politicized content. The increasing politicization of Seurat’s art, the substitution of a subtle color-conveyed mood for a more overt, content-driven message, can seen in the difference between Bathers and Grande Jatte, which depict the same subject matter of relaxing by the Seine but have very different intentions. Bathers and Grande Jatte are similar in subject matter in that they both portray people sitting by the Seine in a diagonal perspective. Many details make the two seem like a pair of opposing paintings. Bathers faces right and Grande Jatte faces left, the same ferry with a tricolor flag traveling in Bathers seems to be landing at Grande Jatte, the figures in Bathers are simply dressed compared to the ornately dressed figures of Grande Jatte. These opposites lead many to initially believe that the two paintings form a social statement highlighting the contrast between the relaxed, unaffected workers in Bathers and the rigid, superficial bourgeoisie in Grande Jatte. (House, 346-7)