The poet and critic Théophile Gautier wrote in La Presse on 21 July that in The Bathers he saw "a kind of Hottentot Venus getting out of the water, and turning towards the spectator a monstrous rump with padded dimples at the bottom which only lack the mark of passementerie".

[5] Distancing himself from Titian and Rubens, Courbet had broken the artistic hierarchy of genres, combining a naked ordinary woman within a landscape of the Franche-Comté to make a scene of everyday life.

[...] Let the people, recognising their misery, learn to blush at their cowardice and to detest tyrants; let the aristocracy, exposed in its greasy and obscene nudity, be whipped on every muscle for its parasitic nature, its insolence and its corruption.

[...] And let every generation, putting on canvas or marble the secret of its genius, be left to posterity without blame or apology for its artists' worksCourbet and Proudhon were from the same region of France, but this defence betrays a misunderstanding of the work of Courbet, who did not want to spend his life painting rural people or attacking the middle classes.

This showed up the earliest composition for the work, in which a nude woman faced the viewer and pointed at a figure getting up on the right, probably a motif borrowed from a Perseus Delivering Andromeda which Courbet had copied in a museum.

That composition was covered by a well-finished scene showing a lifesize figure in a striped costume with his hand in his hair and seemingly hallucinating as he throws himself off a precipice, with Death personified as a skeleton at the base waiting for him.