Chloé

This large nude was a respectable Salon picture when Jules Lefebvre showed it in Paris in 1875. The subject is Chloe, a nymph from an 18th-century French poem, and academic Paris admired the finish and the pose. How it reached its permanent home is the strange part. Sent out to an international exhibition in the colonies, it ended up over the bar of the Young and Jackson pub in Melbourne, where it has hung since 1909. Australian soldiers shipping out in two world wars made a ritual of stopping in to see her. A long-repeated tale that the model killed herself over the painter is barroom invention, with no evidence behind it.