Diana

In 1867 Renoir was 26 and trying to get into the Paris Salon, the official exhibition that could make a young painter's career. He had started with a straightforward nude, but a naked contemporary woman was thought improper, so he added the props of a goddess, a bow in her hands, an animal skin, a deer at her feet with an arrow through its neck, turning her into Diana the huntress in the hope the jury would accept a mythological subject. They rejected it anyway. The model is often said to be Lise Trehot, Renoir's companion in these years, though some scholars now doubt it. The blood on the deer's throat is painted as plainly as everything else.