The Bathers along the Gradaščica (Kopalke ob Gradaščici) were a long-running theme in the Jakopič oeuvre. He claimed to have begun with it from the days of his first walks along the edge of the Ljubljana Marshes towards Stranska Vas, interpreting it as the two-prong assignement suggesting either humid and stuffy or a clear morning atmosphere. The motif of the three poplars is recognizable already at an earlier stage, while combined with the bathers came into its own around 1905, with sharply defined compositional elements. It was during this summer that Jakopič returned to Stranska Vas for an extended period of time during summer. The scene is a complex compilation of his experiences over nearly a decade of work, inspired by the motif of the women swimming in the Gradaščica and the landscape elements visible through the trees towards the sunlight. The Bathers (Kopalke) are some sort of middle ground between nymphs and local girls, an internalized vision of human symbiosis with nature in intense emotional meditation, animated by a gestural paint-handling and layered composition. The expressive ecstasy is even more intense in this earliest version, in which the paint was more viscous and the layering thinner, with the palette drawn towards the red and blue end of the spectrum, giving the viewer an auratic experience underlined by the explosive sphere of the sun behind the poplar canopy.