Woman in Moorish Costume

Frédéric Bazille painted this in 1869, when he was 28 and sharing studios and ambitions with Monet and Renoir, all of them young and mostly unsold. He dressed a model in North African clothing and jewellery against a plain dark ground, joining a French taste for Orientalist subjects that filled the Salons of the time. Bazille had money and used it to help his poorer friends, buying Monet's work when Monet could barely eat. A year after finishing this, he enlisted in the Franco-Prussian War and was killed in action in November 1870, a week short of his 29th birthday, before Impressionism had a name or a first exhibition. The painting is now in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.