Diana

Diana was the most ambitious canvas Renoir submitted to the Salon during his formative years, and its 1867 rejection was among the formative disappointments that shaped his complex relationship with official French art institutions. He used his model Lise Tréhot as the goddess, painting a real woman's body rather than the idealized classical anatomy the Salon expected, a choice that grounded the mythological figure in contemporary observation and made the painting legible to critics as naturalistic rather than academic. The precedents for this approach were available — Corot had painted his bathers with similar naturalistic directness, and Courbet had treated mythological subjects with provocative realism — but the Salon jury found Renoir's Diana insufficiently elevated for the genre she represented. The painting is now at the National Gallery of Art, and it has the retrospective interest of showing the future Impressionist working within and against the academic tradition simultaneously: the compositional format and subject matter are conventional, but the observational approach to the nude figure is already closer to his mature practice than to academic idealization. The dead stag at Diana's feet was apparently added to satisfy the mythological genre requirement — a practical concession to Salon conventions that Renoir found constraining but navigated pragmatically.

The figure of Diana is handled with a firmness and sculptural weight reflecting Renoir's academic training under Gleyre, but the skin modelling already shows his warmth and tactile interest rather than academic coolness. The dead stag at the goddess's feet is painted with detailed naturalism that contrasts with the more idealised treatment of the figure. The forest setting is dark and summary, framing the figure without competing.