泉

In March 1875 Renoir put 20 canvases into an auction at the Hotel Drouot with Monet, Sisley and Berthe Morisot, hoping to raise money after the first Impressionist exhibition had sold almost nothing. The bidding turned so hostile that police were called to keep order in the room, and his pictures went for about 100 francs apiece. He went on painting large figures regardless. La Source, a nymph at a spring, was a standard subject in the official Salon, and the woman standing in for the nymph is a working model, the actress Henriette Henriot, who sat for more than ten of his pictures in those years. By the 1890s the canvas was travelling, shown at a Red Cross charity exhibition in St Petersburg in 1896 and in Weimar in 1904 as Die Quelle.