持网的渔夫

Bazille painted this in 1868, and it was a small act of nerve. The male nude had once been the grand subject of French academic painting, but by the 1860s living painters had all but left it to the past. Bazille, still in his twenties and close to Monet and Renoir, put a naked man outdoors in real daylight, throwing a fishing net by a riverbank, with a second figure resting on the grass behind. The Salon jury turned it down. So the picture went up on the wall of his studio on the rue La Condamine, the same rooms his friends were using while they worked out the new painting soon to be called Impressionism. Bazille was killed in the war two years later, at 28.