La Toilette

Bazille finished this large canvas in 1870, hoping the Paris Salon would take it and set his career on solid ground. A seated woman is being dressed by two attendants, a subject as old as painting, but handled with the bright, frank light he and his friends Monet and Renoir were chasing. The Salon jury turned it down. A few months later the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Bazille enlisted, and on the 28th of November he was killed leading an assault at Beaune-la-Rolande. He was 28. He had helped fund the young Impressionists before they even had a name, and this is among the last ambitious pictures he lived to complete.