QUOTE : Meanwhile, Renoir was hard at work on his vast painting, The Large Bathers (1884–1887), painstakingly sketching, reworking and perfecting a voluptuous Maria as she reclined naked to treat viewers to the sight of her radiant skin, firm breasts and sun-kissed hair. But of all Maria’s dramatic incarnations, one of the most talked about at that year’s Salon was undoubtedly Puvis de Chavannes’s The Sacred Grove of the Arts and Muses (1884).