On arriving in Paris to set herself up as a seamstress, Aline had become part of the great mass of social displacement and confusion, part of the demi-monde of women on the fringes of respectable life, making a living as best they could. ‘Thousands of floating existences–criminals and kept women–which drift about in the underworld of a great city’ as Balzac wrote to Manet, recommending that the painter take this as the subject of his paintings, which indeed he did, reimagining the Venus of the Second Empire as a streetwalker in his notorious canvas Olympia, which was painted in 1863, the year after Gauguin arrived in Paris. Olympia was to hold overwhelming significance for Gauguin all his life. In 1891, he spent days in the Musée du Luxembourg trying to copy it; though he eventually gave up, this did not dismay him. Rather the opposite: to be unable to capture the magic only made the magic more alluring. Throughout his mature life, he would carry a photograph of the painting and pin it up on the walls of his studio wherever he happened to be in the world.
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