埃莱夫西斯波塞冬节上的芙丽涅

The story here comes from Athenaeus, a Greek writer from around the year 200. At a seaside festival for the god Poseidon at Eleusis, the celebrated courtesan Phryne is said to have let down her hair and stepped naked into the sea before the crowd, and the painter Apelles, watching, took her as the model for his lost Aphrodite rising from the waves. Siemiradzki finished this enormous canvas in 1889 and built the whole scene around that moment: Phryne pale at the water's edge beneath a parasol, a temple and bright sky behind her, the onlookers turned her way. He was painting sunlit antiquity like this while much of the Russian art around him had turned to peasants and social truth.