Of course, in order to understand the inspiration Matisse derived from Cézanne’s bathers, it is important to understand his relationship with the painting Three Bathers. In 1895, an art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, introduced Matisse to the works of Cézanne 
at a showing of one hundred and fifty of his pieces. Matisse was immediately impressed and wrote to his sons about the wonderful paintings and sketches he saw there, referring specifically to “those strange bathers of extraordinary sobriety” (qtd Krumrine 4). He admired Cézanne’s ability to create “sober” masterpieces that were as good as the works exhibited in the salon but that did not follow the normal conventions but were instead “strange” (Durozoi 8). A few years later, Matisse returned to Vollard’s gallery with the intentions of buying Van Gogh’s Arlésienne (1889) but changed his mind in order to instead buy Van Gogh’s Les Alyscamp (c. 1880s) which he could not afford. It was only when he returned with the money he had borrowed from a friend that he noticed Cézanne’s Three Bathers. Now unsure of what to do, he went home to think and decided to buy the Cézanne. He did not, however, have the twelve-hundred francs needed to buy it since he had already borrowed the five hundred needed for the Van Gogh (Flam 72). As a result, the purchase of Cézanne’s Three Bathers put Matisse hundreds of francs into debt, demonstrating how important to him this painting was. Over the next four decades, it proved to have been a worthy investment. Its acquisition served as an inspiration for his paintings for many years, particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century.