Susanna at Her Bath

Chassériau sent this Susanna to the Salon of 1839 on a canvas more than two and a half metres high. The story comes from the Book of Daniel. Two respected elders spy on a young married woman bathing in her garden and threaten to accuse her of adultery unless she gives in to them. She refuses, is condemned on their word, and is saved when the young Daniel questions the two men separately and their stories fail to agree. Chassériau pushes the elders back into the shadow of the trees at the upper right and gives almost the whole picture to Susanna, standing in the water with a white cloth.

At the end of that same year a young actress, Alice Ozy, appeared at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in the first run of a comic opera called La Chaste Suzanne. About ten years later the writer Théophile Gautier introduced her to Chassériau. She became his lover for two years and posed for him. In 1884, almost three decades after the painter's death, this canvas entered the Louvre as her gift.