Truth

Jules Lefebvre showed this at the Paris Salon of 1870, the last such state exhibition of the Second Empire before it fell. Within months France was at war with Prussia, Paris under siege and the Emperor gone. The picture itself is calm and cool: a nude woman rising out of the dark, one arm stretched straight up holding a golden mirror to the light, the other gripping a rope that vanishes overhead. She is an old saying made into a body, that truth lies hidden at the bottom of a well and has to be drawn up into view. Lefebvre appears to be the first painter to picture Truth this way, as a nude lifting a mirror from a well, and others borrowed the idea after him. The French state bought the canvas in 1871.