[MELBOURNE] Portrait of Jules Joseph Lefebvre, the French artist who painted “Chloé”. Paris, circa 1879.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 104 x 62 mm; verso with the imprint of the photographic studio of Ferdinand Mulnier, 25 Boulevard des Italiens, which also mentions the gold medal awarded to him at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and with contemporary captions in ink and pencil identifying the sitter as Lefebvre; in fine condition.

The creator of a Melbourne icon.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) trained as a painter at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the early 1850s. Between 1855 and 1898, he exhibited no fewer than 72 works in the Paris Salon, the majority of them oil portraits of exotic women. In the Salon of 1875 he exhibited Chloé, an evocation of a pastoral idyll from classical antiquity, inspired by André Chenier’s poem Mnazile et Chloé. The painting – a full-length nude portrait – won Lefebvre the prestigious Gold Medal of Honour. The beautiful young model who posed for Lefebvre was a 19-year-old Parisienne identified only as Marie, who is reputed to have committed suicide out of unrequited love at the age of 21.

The painting’s association with Australia goes all the way back to 1879, when it was brought out for exhibition in the French gallery at the Sydney International Exhibition of that year. The following year it was part of the Melbourne International Exhibition. The painting won a gold medal at both events.

Chloé was then purchased by Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald of Melbourne, for 850 guineas – an astronomical sum for the time, particularly in the Australian colonies. In 1883 Fitzgerald loaned the painting to the National Gallery, on the understanding it would be returned to him after his proposed three-year visit to Ireland. However, its full-frontal nudity proved scandalous in the puritanical atmosphere of Melbourne society, and after only three weeks the Gallery was forced to bow to pressure from the Presbyterian Assembly: Chloé was essentially banned from public display in Melbourne, and Fitzgerald was obliged to send the painting to Adelaide for safe-keeping during his absence from Australia. From the late 1880s until his death in 1908, Chloé hung in Fitzgerald’s magnificent Lonsdale Street residence, “Rostella” – even though he was forced to move her from the front room to the back of the 24-room mansion after complaints from prurient passers-by.

In 1908 the painting was acquired from Fitzgerald’s estate at auction for £800 – less than Fitzgerald had paid for it nearly three decades earlier – by Melbourne publican Henry Figsby Young. Since 1909 the painting has been on permanent display in the bar of Young & Jackson’s Hotel on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets. Chloé has long been synonymous with this famous Melbourne landmark, and the painting itself – in turn condemned, romanticised and fetishised – has played a significant part in the cultural and social history of the city.

Trove locates no portraits of Jules Joseph Lefebvre in any Melbourne (or indeed Australian) institutional collections.