Claude's Wife (The Adulteress)

In 1872 a trial in Paris set off a public argument about adultery and the rights of women. A wealthy landowner, Arthur Leroy du Bourg, had killed his unfaithful wife. The playwright Alexandre Dumas fils joined in with a pamphlet, L'Homme-femme, that ended by advising the betrayed husband to kill her, and the following year he put the same theme on stage in a play called La Femme de Claude. Francesco Mosso, a young Turin painter, took that title for this large canvas of a woman lying dead on a sofa, an honour killing presented under a literary name. According to his friend Marco Calderini, the image first came to him in 1874 in a room of the Turin Prefecture, when he saw a beam of sunlight trembling on an old sofa covered in pale satin. He painted it in Rome, and when it was shown at the Turin Promotrice in 1877 it provoked heated discussion and criticism. The City of Turin bought it straight away.