To show how Matisse altered the painting over time, conservators at the institute combined various digital images of the work produced from infrared reflectograms, scanned X-radiographs and early photographs.

[8] The Art Institute of Chicago, where Bathers by a River is on display in the permanent collection, indicates that World War I may have influenced the painting's final form: NPR said of the picture: In another description of 2010's "Radical Invention" exhibit, NPR said, "The climax of the show includes two of his most extraordinary paintings, both combining an extreme of abstraction with readable figurative images.

Matisse reworked this painting over the entire period covered by the exhibition, changing it from a lightweight pastel-colored beach scene to an exotic Eden, a gigantic icon with four female demigoddesses outlined against a row of broad flat vertical panels, with a sinister—or is it benign?—white snake rearing up its head from the bottom of the canvas.

[16] The Chicago Tribune wrote that the picture is an, "aesthetically muted, visually rigid work of early 20th century experimentation.

"[12] The New York Times said of Bathers by a River, "With its immense dolmen-tree-trunk figures in shades of gray, blue and pink, it remains one of the most difficult, least ingratiating of modernist masterpieces.