The present work, depicting a group of campers, is a highly finished variation of this celebrated theme. In 1953-54, Fernand Léger created a number versions of Le Campeur; the monumental final state depicts a group of five figures posed along a river in a larger landscape that also incorporates man-made architectural elements (see fig. 1). As was Léger’s practice with his greatest works, he began by making sketches and more developed works on paper before creating highly finished oil versions that would lead to a “final state” (an etat défnitif) usually done on a monumental scale. Le Campeur, étude is one of these oil versions, focusing on the female figure and two children at the lower right portion of the final composition. In addition to this work there is another study of these three figures with more abstracted swaths of coloration, as well as two oils showing the larger composition as a whole (see figs. 2-4).

The present work stands out from the other oils in its evocative use of color. Unlike the other compositions that either play with Léger’s employment of disassociated color swaths or use a non-naturalistic yellow background tone, Le Campeur, étude instead uses tones of blue to frame the scene in both sky and river, flipping the figures in their positioning and giving the seated female figure a jaunty yellow bathing cost.mes . The artist plays with creating figural monumentality through areas of exposed primed canvas, and multiple layers of color in the figures’ flesh from a slight green in the boy’s face at lower left to an almost coral-color in the female figure’s arm. The overall effect is highly sculptural and seems to reference Seurat in each figure’s gravitas and solidity.

The present work is directly related to an important series of "country outing" pictures that Léger completed in the early-to-mid 1950s. Inspired by not only by Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe but also by Seurat’s Une Baignade à Asnière and a number of works by the eighteenth-century master Jacques Louise David (see fig. 5). In Seurat’s work for example, a similar setting—a riverbank in a semi-industrial area—foreshadows Léger’s adoption of the theme. In Seurat, too, was a predecessor whose focus on solidity of form permeated Léger’s works for decades.

Similar to Pablo Picasso's focus on the Old Masters in the 1950s, Léger was mindful of the artists of the past and decided to pay tribute during these last few years of his life. In 1948-49 he painted Leisure (Homage à Louis David), a fanciful figural scene also set in an abstracted countryside with figures in casual dress seemingly enjoying a day of rest (see fig. 6). While the imagery that Léger is quoting here from Jacques-Louis David could hardly be seen to be of the same subject (the female figure at lower left for example quoting Marat’s corpse in the bath in The Death of Marat, the dynamism and handling of the posing holds much in common, also visible in La Mort de Seneque (see fig. 7).

Concerning the contrasts inherent in these pictures from the 1950s, Léger said, "If I was able to approach very close to a realistic figuration, it was because the violent contrast between my workmen and the metal geometry in which they are set is at its maximum. Modern sculptures, whether social or other, are valid insofar as this law of contrasts is respected; otherwise one falls back on the classical picture of the Italian Renaissance" (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, op. cit., p. 162). Léger’s painting of this t.mes was to have a profound effect on color-field and Pop Art painting in the later twentieth century. Artists from Frank Stella to Roy Lichtenstein would incorporate elements of Léger’s work into their canvases (see fig. 8). "Léger's presence in Lichtenstein's oeuvre," writes Philippe Büttner, "is indeed more than obvious. Again and again he gives places of prominence to quotations of Léger's motifs.... Lichtenstein recognized that his own art shared many things in common with Léger's, such as an interest in industrial subjects, in factories and the city, and emphasized that these things surely also had something fundamentally to do with Pop" (Fernand Léger, Paris—New York (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2008, p. 21; see fig. 4). Part of Léger's genius, throughout his career, was to embrace both the fully abstract and fully representational. His deconstructed canvases just before World War I would be heavily entwined with the Orphists and Cubists, while his Purist bent in the 1920s is perhaps the most emblematic of the "Call to Order" felt immediately after the war in France. During his remaining decades he would marry these two principles, creating concrete imagery, such as that found in Le Campeur, étude, which would be inspirational to future generations.