La Perle et la Vague

Paul Baudry finished this in 1862 and showed it at the Paris Salon the next year, in the heyday of Napoleon III's Second Empire, when the official art world had a great appetite for polished mythological nudes. A woman lies at the edge of a rocky shore, turning her head back over her shoulder to meet your eye, and because Baudry tucked a half-open oyster shell into the rocks the picture was read as a kind of Venus, born from the sea like a pearl. It was one of the most admired nudes of its Salon, though some critics thought it too openly sensual. Empress Eugénie bought it that same year for 20,000 francs, one of her costliest purchases. It hangs now in the Prado in Madrid rather than in a French museum.