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Visitors will be startled by the juxtaposition of paintings with fashion plates or surviving garments astonishingly close to those seen in the canvases. Two paintings by Paul Cézanne, The Promenade and The Conversation, were copied almost line-for-line from fashion plates that appeared in La Mode Illustrée. A green and black striped promenade dress is a dead ringer for the one worn by Monet's Camille. "I really wanted to have something so evocative that people could identify it without looking at the label," Groom says. "I was looking for certain fabrics and silhouettes that would tie in with the paintings." She was delighted to secure a black gown similar to the one depicted in Renoir's ambitious portrait of Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children—the first Impressionist painting acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Renoir considered black "the queen of colors," and the portrait makes a good argument for it. In a couple of miraculous cases, the actual gown worn by the sitter survives. The black-and-white dotted dress modeled by Albert Bartholomé's wife in his painting In the Conservatory was preserved with the painting in the Musée d'Orsay; Madame Bartholomé died shortly after the canvas was completed, and the artist kept the garment MADAME GEORGES CHARPENTIER AND HER CHILDREN by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French,1841-1919); 153.7 x 190.2 centimeters, 1878. Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art. 35 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 corset," the magazine La vie Parisienne insisted. Colored underwear was too clearly intended to be seen; satin was inherently erotic, its buttery texture approximating human skin. (Nana's silk drawers were equally novel and controversial, as bifurcated garments were still considered improperly masculine by many.) The same blue corset appears in Manet's Before the Mirror—possibly an early version of Nana. But Nana raises the scandalous stakes, showing us the woman's entire body and face, as well as a fully-clothed man sitting behind her. A woman erotically dressed in a satin corset and lacy chemise was more alluring than a nude woman, not less, Steele writes, especially when her allure was validated by a male spectator. A corset was often called a "body"—"corps" in French—blurring the boundaries between the clothing and the clothed. It worked wonders on the female figure, creating curves where nature had not. The invention of the steam-molding process in 1868 made Nana's flawless hourglass shape possible. If it was an obvious fabrication, then the lie was better than the reality. The exhibition includes a case of undergarments spread out before Rolla, Henri Gervex's scandalous painting of a naked woman asleep, her clothing hastily discarded at the foot of the bed.