Baigneuse au griffon

Renoir showed this at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1870, and within months France would be at war with Prussia and the empire would collapse. He was not yet 30 and still trying to break in the respectable way, with a large, carefully finished nude of the kind the Salon rewarded. The standing woman is Lise Tréhot, his lover and favourite model for years, posed with the frank stance of an antique statue while her clothes and little griffon dog wait at her feet. Courbet had scandalised the same public with heavy, lifelike bathers, and Renoir is half following him and half softening him. Lise kept sitting for him until 1872, then married another man and disappeared from his painting for good.