About this work
*Diane Hunting* (*Diane à la chasse*) is an oil on canvas painting made by Marie Laurencin in 1908. It draws on one of Western art's most enduring archetypes — Diane, the Roman goddess of the hunt, of war, and of the night — and filters her through the sensibility of an artist already pulling apart the conventions of how a woman should be seen. Tagged by art historians under Greek and Roman Mythology and The Nude in Art, the painting belongs to Early Modernism and bears the hallmarks of Laurencin's 1908 moment: angular yet pliant forms, a palette drawing on earthy and muted tones rather than the bright Fauvist hues then circulating through Montmartre, and a figure rendered with the kind of solemn self-possession that would define Laurencin's treatment of women throughout her career. The goddess stands apart from the heroic tradition — not triumphant, not monumental, but quietly interior and solitary, her body described with the fluid, curving outlines Laurencin preferred to the sharp fragmentation of her Cubist peers.
Many of Laurencin's early pieces explore iconographies of female independence, most often with reference to classical antiquity — and *Diane Hunting* is one such work, a painting of the ancient Greek goddess Artemis held in the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Completed the same year as *Apollinaire and His Friends*, it presents a vision of a solitary and self-possessed woman that stands in deliberate counterpoint to the social world of the Bateau-Lavoir. In 1907, Picasso had introduced Laurencin to Guillaume Apollinaire at the Salon des Indépendants, beginning a six-year relationship during which Apollinaire dubbed her "Our Lady of Cubism."
Laurencin herself resisted the label, drawing instead from the dreamlike imagery of modern poets and the soft colors of the Impressionists. Choosing to paint a nude goddess — autonomous, armed, beyond the male gaze — in the thick of that milieu was its own quiet argument about where her work was headed.
This is a painting that rewards a considered interior — a study, a reading room, a bedroom with high ceilings and natural light. Laurencin painted mainly female figures: pale creatures with dark, melancholy eyes, and *Diane Hunting* carries that quality of hushed inwardness into whatever room it enters. It speaks directly to the viewer drawn to early modernism's more searching, poetic registers — those who find in mythology not grandeur but strangeness. Against a pale or deep-toned wall alike, the painting holds its own: cool, self-contained, and subtly charged.
