Salomé

Regnault showed this at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1870 and it was the sensation of the year. He was 26, a Prix de Rome winner, and the picture began as something else, a study of a model that he enlarged and reworked into Salome, hair loose, a platter and knife at her knee hinting at the head of John the Baptist. That summer France went to war with Prussia. Holders of the Rome prize were excused from service, but Regnault enlisted anyway. He was killed just outside Paris at Buzenval in January 1871, a few months after the Salon closed, not yet 28. When the painting was sold to America in 1912 there was an outcry back in France.