The setting of this languid bathing scene is possibly the pond at Charleston Farmhouse, near Lewes in East Sussex, where Grant settled with Vanessa Bell in 1916. The warm colour and stippled paint surface reflect a renewed engagement with modern continental art, and a return to Grant's 'spotted' manner of painting in the early 1910s. In 1919 the Bloomsbury artists had been host to André Derain and Pablo Picasso, and in December that year Grant had persuaded his friend the economist Maynard Keynes to buy George Seurat's oil study of 1884–1885 of the standing couple towards the right of his famous pointillist painting 'Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte.' The seated figure viewed from the back at the left of Grant's Bathers echoes a seated nude at the left of Seurat's iconic painting.